
Class L i . <, 
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A PIPE 

OP 

DUTCH K AX A STEP 

OR 

SIX DAYS IN HOLLAND. 

BY 

T. W. ERLE. 

I ; ; 



1851 & 1860. 



A) 

st ix 7 




Jlcbicafeb to 



J H N L. ROGET 



BY HIS OLD FRIEND 



PREFACE. 



The following pages are the result of two short 
tours in Holland; one of them made about nine 
years ago, and the second in last July. The 
notes which were put together in 1851 have 
been reprinted with a few additions, and form 
the first half of this book 



ItflLLHALL, 

October, 18G0. 



SIX DAYS IN HOLLAND. 



It was with something of the same feeling of 
immeasurable satisfaction as that with which 
Talfourd ordered his " Two cars for Chaniouni!" 
(vide his " Vacation Rambles ") that I found 
myself on the morning of the 19th of April 1851 
walking aboard " That good ship Ocean, A.I., 
500 tons, O.M., Captain Hast, for Rotterdam 
direct, &c, &c.," and really and actually, though 
it seemed much too delicious to be true, en route 
for Holland, so long the object of my curiosity 
and wonder. It seemed to my impatience as if 
the mail bags would never come, but come at 
length they did, and at 10.30 exactly, the cry of 

B 



2 



" Move her ahead ! " followed by a gurgling noise, 
a palsied quaking of the paddle-boxes, and a 
rich, fullbodiecl, and fruity aroma of Thames mud 
stirred up, gave notice that we were actually off. 
Bearing in mind the maxim that in case of sea- 
sickness it is good policy to be (like an artificial 
tooth grafted on an old stump) " founded on 
fact," we made a very considerably substantial 
dinner at three. None, however, but the most 
rampant of appetites could have failed to be 
daunted by the contemplation of the stewardess 
who flitted about {horresco referens ! as Virgil 
would have said) like a brown moth, in a snuff- 
coloured worsted cap, which, to characterize it 
generally, was afflicting, and in slippers to 
match, which (I forbear again to press the 
details) were unwholesome. Then there appeared 
on the stage a fish, or to speak more accurately, 
a lump or block of some organic matter, called 



3 



by too flattering courtesy a cod, with {infandum 
dictu !) a variegated head, a craniological pheno- 
menon which was somewhat startling. The said 
head, too, was so preternaturally large that it 
was obvious Mr. Coddy had fallen a victim to 
water on the brain, a disease to which fishes of 
course must be particularly liable. Land disap- 
peared about 7 p.m. Tea, and then the "Ingian 
veed," which latter luxury, though sometimes 
the object of unreasonable cavil, is the undoubted 
prerogative of travellers, were the order of the 
evening till turning into bed about one o'clock. 

On awaking about six the next morning after 
a most comfortable sleep on the ledge-with-a- 
rim-round-it which with a little imaginative 
pleasantry they called a berth, I found we were 
just entering the mouth of the Maas or Meuse. 
By the way, that getting in and out of bed some- 
times forms an important ingredient in the fun 

b 2 



4 



and excitement of a sea-voyage, and more par- 
ticularly so to persons of an adventurous turn of 
mind who affect the performance of hazardous 
gymnastic exploits. I achieved a partial mount 
with triumphant success, ascending via a carpet 
bag and a brass turn-cock. The next stage was 
to a berth immediately below that which was 
the object of my hopes and aspirations. Its rim, 
however, looked so suspiciously rickety that I 
discreetly stepped just inside it. My foot lighted 
on some substance which unquestionably was 
neither bed nor board, but which, from its warm 
temperature, and from a groan of anguish which 
emanated from behind the curtains, I judged to 
be in intimate connexion with a human body. 
A vague feeling of uneasiness still haunts me 
for having perhaps trodden upon, and thereby 
irretrievably flattened, some unoffending gen- 
tleman's nose. The surprising difficulty of 



5 



getting up to bed gave rise to serious appre- 
hensions as to the prospective feasibility of the 
descent therefrom. That, however, was accom- 
plished summarily, so to speak, for in a signally 
abortive attempt to execute it satisfactorily, and 
without prejudice to the already, alas ! too 
injured nose, if such indeed it was, I tumbled 
" promiscuous like," with a mighty crash 
(Soviryo-Ev h itztTLov as Homer would say) on the 
floor of the cabin, so hard that it is still 
a subject of devout inward congratulation to 
me not to have shot through it into the sea. 

The sea coast as far as the eye could reach 
was edged with Dunes, or sandhills, blown up 
by the wind. There is an interesting account 
of these Dunes, and of their process of formation, 
and their occasional excursions inland, in the 
introduction to a " Handbook for Holland" 
published by one Murray, a bookseller in Albe- 



6 



marie Street, who is not altogether unknown to 
fame and tourists. The introduction referred to 
is amusing, and would repay the trouble of 
perusal even to those who have not a visit to 
Holland in contemplation. 

About two hours more brought us to Rotter- 
dam, where we landed at the Boompjes, the 
principal quay of the town, extending along the 
bank of the Maas, and, like all Dutch quays, 
prettily planted with trees, whence its name 
(" little trees"). On this quay are some of the 
more important buildings of the town, the India 
house, a great Jewish synagogue, and three of 
the chief hotels. The water is so deep that the 
largest ships can lie close in shore. The Dutch 
custom-house officers are universally civil and 
obliging. While waiting for our baggage, our 
feet were assailed by a small army of shoe-blacks 
who abound in most Dutch towns, performing 



7 



their office for about a penny, like our red-coated 
squadron in London. Their plan of assault was, 
it appeared, to give any unwary boot tliey could 
catch a dab of black looking fluid, like genuine 
Day and Martin, but which dried white, by 
which means they occasionally came in for the 
job of rubbing it off again. Finding, however, 
my boots suddenly animated with a liveliness of 
a menacing character as often as they stooped 
to the attack, the invading squadron found their 
efforts bootless, and retreated. 

Then came breakfast at the " Pays Bas " to 
an extent which, to a spectator unacquainted 
with the effects of sea air on certain appetites, 
would have been alarming to contemplate. 
" Tribus ursis quod satis esset." The Pays Bas 
is a capital hotel in all respects, and the charges 
do not unreasonably "impinge upon the pocket/' 
as some wiseacre expressed himself in The 



8 



Times the other day, wishing probably to im- 
part a touch of the florid to his advertisement ! 
The next thing, of course, after getting some 
Dutch money, which is a convenient coinage and 
extremely simple, was to set sail on a voyage of 
discovery through the town. Talking of foreign 
coinages— it is curious to observe in what a 
rayless abyss of ignorance some travellers live 
in regard to a matter which most materially 
concerns their welfare, namely, the respective 
values of the coins they shower about them ; 
although the exercise of an infinitesimal quan- 
tity of trouble and attention on entering a new 
country would quickly put them in possession 
of the little knowledge required for the security 
of their exchequer and temper. 

A notable instance of this came under my 
observation some years ago in the case of an 
individual who vouchsafed me the doubtful 



9 



favour of his company on the Niederwald, and 
who, while I was contemplating in speechless 
delight the entrancing beauties of the landscape 
seen from that magnificent belvedere, broke the 
spell by presenting his vile card and disclosing 
that his name was Juclkin! — " John Judkin, 
Sir, of Euston Square, if you should pass that 
way, and would look in," &c. Towards evening, 
the wretched being (for how could a man who 
lives in Euston Square, and calls himself by 
such a hateful name as Judkin be otherwise 
than miserable ?) became so amicable and 
confidential that at last he "unbuzzomed" 
all his sorrows. How much happier would 
he have been in the New Eoad than on the 
Rhine ! The menageries in the beds afflicted 
him miserably externally (he spoke with much 
feeling on this point, and seemed, indeed, to 
be a martyr to cutaneous irritation) ; the Rhine 



10 



wines caused him to be dismally wretched, 
tlirongli pangs of a spasmodic character, inter*- 
natty ; and the coinage made life generally a 
burden. He scooped out two great hanclfuls 
of all sorts of coins, Belgian, French, Prussian, 
and German, the last in all the degrees of 
variegation usual with that currency, and differ- 
ing in colour according to the predominance 
of pewter, tin, or brass, in their composition, 
and desired to know the value of the whole mass. 
I acquainted him with the aggregate amount, and 
then endeavoured, with meritorious perseverance, 
but lamentably bad success, to impress on his 
mind the respective names and values of some 
of the commoner ones. But he looked like 
"grini-visaged, comfortless, despair " all through 
the lesson, and at last said with a desponding 
sigh " Thank you, Sir ; I never could make out 
them crikers!" (" kreutzers ".) He probably 



11 



returned home a sadder and a wiser man, and 
will not again swell " the train of our country- 
men who, beguiled by fashion, go every year 
with their purses, eyes, and mouths, wide open, 
in mournful procession up and down the Rhine." 

At Rotterdam, as in other Dutch cities, there 
are but few streets properly so called, but 
innumerable canals with broad wharves on each 
side planted with trees. The houses being 
commonly built with peaks resembling gable- 
ends, and standing on piles which are subject to 
a weakness for sinking, have a most picturesque 
appearance, some nodding at one another fami- 
liarly across the street, some reclining dos d dos 
against the row behind, and others rubbing 
their heads together, as though whispering 
confidential communications into each other's 
ears. I had an opportunity of witnessing the 
process of laying a foundation of piles, a labo- 



12 



rious operation enough most unquestionably, and 
probably expensive in a corresponding degree. 

This being Easter Sunday, the ships in the 
canals were all dressed with flags, which made 
the whole scene very gay and pretty in the 
sunshine. But the quays, to be seen to advan- 
tage, ought to be visited when the trees are in 
full leaf. On the other hand there is the draw- 
back in hot weather of the effluvium of the 
semi-stagnant water (then said to "grow") 
which is not perceptible earlier in the year. At 
Amsterdam, where the water grows much 
more freely than at Rotterdam, anyone whose 
olfactories are sensitive might advantage- 
ously adopt a bit of split cane for compress- 
ing the nostrils, such as is used in the 
dissecting rooms of hospitals when any par- 
ticularly odoriferous subject is in cut. There 
were some, but not very many, of the orna- 



13 



mental barges with gilt prows and sterns which 
one sees in Vandevelde's pictures. There w^ere 
also covered boats used as permanent houses ; 
for some of the Dutch live, like certain Chinese, 
entirely on the water, so that it would be 
difficult to decide to w r hich element they belong. 
They resemble, in this respect, that singular 
quadruped described by the exhibitors of travel- 
ling menageries as the " Vunderful amphibilious 
cow vich cant live on the land and dies in 
the vater ! " — a phenomenon in natural history 
the mystery of whose being has hitherto eluded 
all attempts at investigation by zoologists. The 
tide in the canals is anything but what the 
popular nautical melody of " I'm afloat " calls 
6 ' wild raging," being the tamest and fattest of 
solids, like rich turtle soup. Possibly, however, 
those epithets may be thought to be not altoge- 
ther so inapplicable to the furious esprit de mud 



14 



which is occasionally wafted from it, to the 
utter discomfiture and confusion of all well-bred 
and polite olfactories. 

Rotterdam is associated in the mind of every 
schoolboy, and of everyone who ever was a 
schoolboy, with the famous Mynheer Van Clam 
who, according to the song of " The Cork Leg," 
was in the habit of congratulating himself every 
morning, and that too, as it would seem, audibly, 
on being " the richest merchant in Rotterdam." 
His reflections on all subjects appear to have 
invariably culminated in " with a tooral looral," 
&c. One gathers from this circumstance that 
he must have enjoyed a flow of animal spirits 
such as is not usually found capable of existing 
in concurrence with the anxieties to which 
mercantile men are a prey. He appears, indeed, 
to have been of as irrepressibly jovial a tempe- 
rament as the man somewhere or other described 



15 



by Dickens, who on being condemned to a term 
of solitary confinement, worried the gaoler, and 
drove the authorities of the prison to distraction, 
by lying flat on his back and warbling comic 
songs all day. 

Seeing the tower of the cathedral rising into 
the air at some little distance, I made for that, 
and found service going on. Washington 
Irving, in Knickerbocker's History of Xew 
York, gives rather an amusing caricature of 
the deliberation attending Dutch proceedings, 
in his account of the building of this church : — 
" My great grandfather by the mother's side, 
Hermanns Van Clattercop, when employed to 
build the large stone church at Rotterdam, 
which stands about 300 yards to your left after 
you turn off from the Boompjes, and which is so 
conveniently constructed that all the zealous 
Christians of Rotterdam prefer sleeping through 



16 



a sermon there to any other church in the city. 
My great grandfather, I say, when employed to 
build that famous church, did, in the first place, 
send to Delft for a box of long pipes ; then 
having purchased a new spitting-box, and a 
hundredweight of the best Virginia, he sat 
himself down and did nothing for the space of 
three months but smoke most laboriously. 
Then did he spend full three months more 
in trudging on foot, and voyaging in the 
trekschuit, from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, to 
Delft, to Haarlem, to Leyden, to the Hague, 
knocking his head, and breaking his pipe, 
against every church in his road. Then did 
he advance gradually nearer and nearer to 
Rotterdam, until he came in full sight of the 
identical spot whereon the church was to be 
built. Then did he spend three months longer 
in walking round and round it : contemplating 



17 



it first from one point of view, and then from 
another ; now would he peep at it through a 
telescope from the other side of the Meuse ; 
and now would he take a "bird's-eye glance at 
it from the top of one of those gigantic wind- 
mills which protect the gate of the city. The 
good folks of the place were on the tiptoe of 
expectation and impatience ; notwithstanding 
all the turmoil of my great-grandfather, not a 
symptom of the church was to be seen ; they 
even began to fear it would never be brought 
into the world, but that its great projector 
would lie down and die in labour of the mighty 
plan he had conceived. At length, having 
occupied twelve good months in puffing and 
paddling, stalking and walking, having tra- 
velled over all Holland, and even taken a peep 
into France and Germany, having smoked live 
hundred and ninety-nine pipes, and three hun- 

c 



18 

dredweight of the best Virginia tobacco, my 
great-grandfather gathered together all that 
knowing and industrious class of citizens who 
prefer attending to anybody's business sooner 
than their own, and having pulled off his coat 
and five pair of breeches, he advanced sturdily 
up, and laid the corner-stone of the church, in 
the presence of the whole multitude, just at 
the commencement of the thirteenth month." 

The cathedral is very large, but in conse- 
quence of the peculiar arrangement of the 
pews, which rise up in banks on all sides 
from the middle, it somewhat resembles a 
concert or lecture-room. The men seldom 
take off their hats in church even during the 
service, for it is a principle of Calvinism that 
the Deity is not to be worshipped by external 
forms. Just as I entered, the whole congre- 
gation sang a hymn together without instru- 



19 



mental accompaniment. The effect was very 
good, but I should have liked to hear 

u The great organ almost burst his pipes 

Groaning for power, and rolling through the court 
A long melodious thunder to the sound 
Of solemn psalms and silver litanies," 

for the organ of the Cathedral at Rotterdam 
rivals the Leviathan at Haarlem in size and 
power. Shortly after the psalm, the commu- 
nion service began. A table was spread at 
the side of the nave just below the pulpit 
(the chancel is not used in Dutch churches), 
and from this table the vessels were brought 
to another in the middle of the church as they 
were wanted. Then about sixty persons seated 
themselves in four rows, and the priest ad- 
ministered the bread and wine to those near 
him, who then passed on the plate and cup to 
those beyond ; the priest all the time speaking 



20 



energetically with a good deal of vehement 
gesture. Those who had received left the 
church, and others supplied their places. The 
priest was dressed in a black cloth sleeve- 
waistcoat, with long strips of calico of the 
same colour down the back — the dress I believe 
of the Puritan ministers about two centuries 
ago in England. 

As it was Sunday, and the shops therefore 
all religiously shut, my observations of the 
houses were necessarily confined to the exte- 
riors, but on a first visit to a Dutch town these 
afford abundant amusement. Most of the 
smaller shops have signs ; commonly that of 
a Leeuw (lion), varying only in intensity of 
red and degree of ferocity. But the most 
singular emblems are the Saracen's heads 
which are the invariable ornaments of the 
druggists' shops. They differ very much in 



21 



countenance, but all have their mouths wide 
open, and most of them have red caps. One 
would be gaping to a supernatural width, as if 
preparing for the reception of a pill of Brob- 
dignagian dimensions, with the sort of " can't 
help it " expression of countenance which per- 
sons in that embarrassing situation usually 
w r ear* The next, perhaps, would seem to be 
merely indulging in the satisfactory luxury of 
a good yawn. A third would have sixteen 
inches or so of the pinkest and ultra-healthiest 
of tongues dangling out of its mouth, with a 
cheerful wink of its eye, in order to symbolize 
the clear and satisfactory state of the stomach 
that would result from the consumption of the 
drugs in the magazine below. Another mouth 
might be seen wide open like the others, but 
contorted sideways, as though the gentleman 
to whom it belonged were presenting his jaws 



22 



to a dentist in a facilitous position for the 
extraction of one of his very uttermost grinders. 
The history of the sign is not well known, but 
it is said that it was an importation from Jeru- 
salem two or three centuries ago. If so, it 
may possibly be not altogether unconnected 
with Saladin and the Talisman ; but is it 
recorded of that infidel potentate that he had 
a monomania for never shutting his mouth ? 

The grotesque family likeness that subsists 
between the Dutch and English languages is 
entertaining, and it is more strongly marked 
than that between English and German. Many 
Dutch words are the same as ours, but not 
spelt in the latest London fashion. On this 
point see any Dutch dictionary, passim. For 
instance, about every fourth house is inscribed 
with a notice that " Snuif, Koffij, en Thee" is 
sold, and one of the druggists by a notice in 



23 



his window begged to acquaint the public that 
he dealt in Bloed-zuigers, which he rather 
needlessly translated leeches for the benefit of 
any stray English who might have occasion 
for the commodity. 

Of course the innumerable canals require 
innumerable dray -bridges, which are fre- 
quently of ingenious construction. When 
there is occasion to lift a bridge, one half of 
it is raised by levers, the other half being a 
fixture. Whenever a boat passed, it appeared 
to afford the liveliest gratification to the youth 
of Rotterdam to run up the inclined plane of 
the raised side and so bring it down again into 
its place with a tremendous bang. I joined in 
the amusement once or twice, but failed to dis- 
coyer the particular secret of the excitement. 

One of the principal characteristics of a 
Dutch street is its scrupulous, or it would be 



24 



more correct to say, elaborate, cleanliness. A 
grand scrubbification of the exteriors as well 
as of the interiors of the honses takes place 
every Saturday. On the Friday evening the 
Vrouws young and old may be seen every- 
where busily employed with pails and little 
brass garden pumps, shooting streams of water 
over the windows and fronts of the houses as 
vigorously as if they were on fire ; so that the 
unwary pedestrian runs serious risk of finding 
himself suddenly and unexpectedly undergoing 
gratuitous ablution from the misdirected ener- 
gies of a spout. This light skirmishing with 
pails is only considered as introductory to the 
more extensive operations of the morrow. The 
campaign is then resumed with redoubled ac- 
tivity till every thing in the nature of dirt, 
down to the faintest suspicion of a speck of 
dust, is utterly annihilated. Spiders must find 



25 



Holland an uncomfortable country to reside in, 
for besides the unjustifiable prejudices gene- 
rally entertained against that unlucky insect 
with which they everywhere have to contend, 
they are here subject to the vigilant hostility 
of a female police who would view anything 
in the nature of a cobweb with stern intoler- 
ance. And even should any crafty old fly- 
catcher have ensconced himself at the top of 
some lofty church tower out of the reach of 
domiciliary visits from the army of restless 
brooms and scrubbing brushes, yet would his 
appetite suffer from the savour of tobacco from 
which no corner of the low countries is free. 
That spiders do not appreciate the fragrancy 
of even the choicest Havannah may be easily 
ascertained by bestowing a puff on one of them 
as he sits in his web waiting for his breakfast, 
when he will recoil with manifestations of deep 



26 



and indignant disgust, and withdraw into the 
remotest corner of his net with the utmost pre- 
cipitation. 

Almost every house has its mirrors to shew 
what passes in the street, and unless these 
spions, as they are called, grossly misrepresent 
the truth, they must reflect some very pretty 
faces for the gratification of the beholders 
inside. There are no raised pavements like 
ours in Rotterdam, but the space for pedes- 
trians is on the carriage level, and paved with 
thin little bricks called clinkers, with which 
also many of the principal roads in Holland 
are laid throughout, of course at a vast 
expense, — more than £1400 a mile, it is said. 

Wandering about the town, I fell in with a 
young German from Saxony who had been 
imported simultaneously with myself in the 
" Ocean/' and who immediately proposed to 



27 



join me, merely observing " I join you.' 7 
Among other places, we explored the dock- 
yard together. He amused me by keeping 
up a sort of " wickering," like a horse impa- 
tient for his corn, while any one was talking 
to him, indicative, I supposed, of satisfaction, 
or of a general amiability of disposition 
towards the speaker, but it turned out that 
he understood Dutch very little. In return 
for his sociability I saved him from being 
deluded by a roguish valet de place into 
staying the evening at Rotterdam for a pre- 
tended public ball ; a very old trick ; never- 
theless, my companion would not believe me 
that the ball was all "a Harris" till he had 
consulted the niaitre d'hotel and received 
the same advice. I also positively refused to 
allow him to pay a commissionaire who had 
got his luggage from the Custom House three 



28 



times his due, for which, of course, the dis- 
comfited rogue looked at me with no very 
amiable eyes, as much as to say "Just let 
me catch you alone in a dark lane, my boy ! " 
to which I responded (mentally) " Having 
enjoyed at intervals for a long period the 
luxury of mutually punching heads with a 
member of the P. K. (as the gentlemen of 
the prize ring term themselves), and having 
extraordinary muscular power, nothing, my 
very dear sir, would be so refreshing and 
agreeable to me as the little reunion you 
desire. It would indeed be invigorating to 
have an opportunity of quietly polishing off 
one of your fraternity." 

Talking of balls, public festivals, called 
kirmess, are held in Holland, which are much 
resorted to by youthful aspirants to matri- 
monial engagements. Such young ladies " on 



29 



their promotion" as have no sweethearts hire 
them for the occasion ! practically a very con- 
venient custom, but sadly unromantic. I 
remember a certain English damsel dancing 
at a Swiss village festival with a tall young 
Bernese, who at the end of a waltz, by way 
of small-talk, murmured a soft request into 
her ear for trinkgeld after his exertions ! It 
must be owned that the execution of a dance 
with some partners makes a subsequent 
restorative (either in the shape of a livelier 
companion, or a tumbler of champagne) indis- 
pensable. Probably ladies experience the 
same misfortunes, but they are happily exempt 
from subjecting themselves to the dull agony 
of endeavouring to extract conversation from 
a partner as devoid of ideas as a hairdresser's 
dummy : an operation as arduous as the pro- 
verbial labour of squeezing blood out of a stone. 



30 



As the Saxonian and myself strolled about, 
we met flocks of the worthy Rotterdammians 
in their Sunday costume, all so clean. The 
young male swells had mostly encased them- 
selves in waistcoats of uproarious patterns 
which seemed to be the fashion just then. 
The matrons were radiant in many-coloured 
ribbons, like rainbows in fine weather off 
duty and out for a lark. As for the faces of 
the girls, they were as bright and clear as if 
just fresh from the chisel of Madame Tussaud, 
or a dip in Rowland's Kalydor, whereof who 
hath not read the virtues, depicted as they 
are in such glowing colours in numberless 
advertisements rivalling the charms they des- 
cribe, and the ambrosial preparations they 
vaunt, in flowery softness ? 

It may be observed that Dutch damsels of 
modern days are not encased in that lavish 



31 



redundancy of petticoat which was formerly 
the fashion. In days of old, a series of 
changes of that interesting garment constituted 
a maiden's dowry, and therefore, as the whole 
stock in trade were worn together, irrespective 
of number, upon the person, a rich heiress was 
rather a voluminous matter. It was the custom 
too, that for the satisfaction of her husband and 
his friends she should make a public display at 
her marriage of her wealth in dresses by stag- 
gering to the altar banked up in the whole 
collection. Only fancy what the figure of a 
young female millionaire like Miss Killmans- 
egge would be under such circumstances, and 
with the additional a^srravation of crinoline ! It 
might be said of such a bride, when imbedded 
in the multitudinous strata of garments which 
would represent the sum of her worldly pos- 
sessions, that, like a compact estate advertised 



32 



for sale, " the whole property lies in a ring 
fence." One serious objection, however, to 
this arrangement may be discerned in the cir- 
cumstance that it reduces the most admirable 
symmetry of the female figure to a mere matter 
of vague speculation. Just as a Frenchman, 
whether he be an Antinous or a Caliban in 
respect of his legs, finds his peculiarities on 
this point, whatever they may be, wholly ob- 
literated by jellybag trousers. Our immortal 
Milton in his clever poem of Paradise Lost has 
in some degree anticipated our remarks on this 
subject where he says 

" The jelly-bags worn by a French militaire 
Resemble, indeed, in some cases a pair 
Of vertical tunnels, or tubular tents, 
Their breadth is so very extremely immense ; 
And though the discernible fact of progression 
May to the spectator convey the impression 
Of a couple of legs promenading inside, 
Conjecture respecting their shape is defied; 
Just as whether a feminine figure is thin or lean 
Is rendered a difficult question by crinoline." 



33 



The fashionable promenade at Rotterdam 
is a sort of botanic garden with painfully 
formal thickets and walks, in a meadow out- 
side the town. There was by no means the 
large sprinkling of soldiers among the crowd 
which is usual in continental cities. The 
Dutch have an army of about 30,000 men. 
They have also police, in green uniforms, 
looking rather like a compromise between 
a gendarme and the British peeler. 

Walking exercise, we found, has a precisely 
similar effect on Saxonian and English appetites, 
so about three o'clock dinner was put to the 
vote, and carried nem. con. Dutch dinners are 
much the same as Swiss in their subject matter; 
much dearer, however, and, happily, not so 
extravagant in quantity. Oranges always form 
part of a Dutch dessert, and go by the name in 
their tongue of Chinese apples. The little pans 

D 



34 



of charcoal under the dishes to keep them hot 
were a new device to me. A Dutch lady warms 
her feet in a similar manner, using as a foot- 
stool a little square wooden box, the vuur stooff 
(pretty plain English), containing a pan of 
charcoal, and having the lid perforated to allow 
the heat to ascend. These are so universally 
used that they are to be seen by hundreds piled 
against the pillars in every church, and most of 
the bedrooms have a pretty tolerable allowance. 
They are certainly much more agreeable ob- 
jects to contemplate than the wooden or leaden 
boxes which are an equally pervading race in 
Germany, and which serve a far less elegant 
purpose than fostering the fair trotters of those 
pretty Vrouws. It is to be presumed that 
the place of these warm footstools is sup- 
plied at night by our old familiar friend the 
hot bottle. The footstools are of course in- 



35 



compatible with gutta percha soles, for ob- 
vious reasons. 

After dinner, the Saxony man and myself 
started by the railway, and travelled together as 
far as the Hague, he being bound for Amster* 
dam direct. We made an agreement to frater- 
nize again at the latter place, but missed, much 
to my regret, as he was a pleasant fellow, and 
managed to make a dozen or two of English 
words go a wonderful way. Bather more sed- 
ulous ablutions would have been more in 
conformity with Dutch, not to say English, 
prejudices ; but my friend acted up to his 
lights as a German, and was a shade, or to 
speak more accurately, a layer or two, cleaner 
than most of his countrymen. The carriage in 
which we took our places was superlatively 
rickety, and so low and small that it was 
difficult to help being forcibly squeezed into 

d 2 



36 



disobeying tlie order " Be careful to put no 
head nor hands out of te carriages." Dutch 
railway officials are as fond of ringing wheezy 
old bells, and playing eccentric melodies on 
squeaking trumpets, as the Belgians are. The 
Dutch fantasias on the horn, however, are not 
quite so absurd as those of the " Braves 
Beiges" (whose chivalrous military ardour, by 
the way, appears to be exclusively confined to 
the production of those martial squeaks at the 
starting of trains). The smoking is prodigious. 
Every man smokes as naturally as he breathes, 
so that the fastidious in that respect had better 
commit the extravagance of going in the first 
class, or else in the third, which are open. 
Some days after this, I came from Arnheim to 
Utrecht in a carriage with eight men, seven of 
whom smoked all the way; and the evening 
being cold, some ladies who were with us 



37 



desired to have all the windows up. The 
tobacco, providentially, being good, I rather 
enjoyed it (not having the fear of partners at a 
subsequent ball before my eyes), but afterwards 
regretted having omitted to cut a slice of the 
atmosphere, which became a pretty stiff solid, 
and bring it away as a curiosity. 

Our paralytic old vehicle wobbled and scuffled 
along at a good rate through an entirely flat 
country, like a great prairie or a gigantic water 
meadow ; the only break of the flat being the 
bank of an occasional canal, which here are gene- 
rally above the level of the surrounding country. 
Such a prospect is not so ugly after all : mono- 
tonous, no doubt, consisting of grass and water 
ad infinitum, or to express it mathematically 
[grass + water] , n but then the grass is beauti- 
fully green and fresh, and the dykes are always 
brimming fall, and at certain seasons of the 



38 



year glittering with water crowfoot, so that the 
scene is far more agreeable than a great, slimy, 
brown, odoriferous, steamy, hog in the Isle of 
Ely, like the " Dreary Swindle Swamp " where 
the snapping turtle lived. (Vide Bon Graultier.) 
Then the straight rows of trees which seem 
especially to delight Dutch eyes, running along 
the sides of the roads, haye a certain pleasant 
quaintness about them. There is a good reason 
for planting rows of trees along the canals, 
namely, to strengthen the banks ; for the 
canals, being aboye the leyel of much of the 
country through which they are carried, would 
inundate the whole territory about them if let 
loose, spreading as wide and disastrous a con- 
sternation as that caused by the " breaking of 
a bank " in this country. The fields become 
more cheerful towards the end of April, as then 
the cows are turned out for the summer months, 



39 



having been stall-fed all the winter. The plan 
of tying a cloth over their backs to keep them 
warm appears rather comic to a stranger. 
i A large part of the line from Rotterdam to 
Amsterdam is founded on piles, which are often 
under water, and the roadway is laid on faggots 
bound together by stakes and wattles. Not 
many miles from Rotterdam, the railway runs 
through Delft, whence the pottery so called 
used to come. There are some monuments of 
Dutch heroes, of Van Tromp among others, in 
the great church, there, which are worth a visit; 
but the town has declined sadly since the 
English have usurped the pottery market. At 
the present day it looks as deadly lively as 
London in September. 

A very short time brought us to the Hague 
(Hollandice S'Gravenhage) which Lord Ches- 
terfield somewhere or other calls " the prettiest 



40 



village in the world.'' "Though long/' says 
Murray, " the residence of the Stadtholders, 
and now of the King of Holland, up to the 
beginning of the present century the Hague 
ranked only as a village, because it had neither 
corporation nor walls, and did not return mem- 
bers to the States General. It was only, how- 
ever, a village technically speaking. The popu- 
lation is at present about 60,000, or more 
than three-fourths of that of Rotterdam. There 
are several good hotels at the Hague. One 
of them bears a sign very common in Hol- 
land, namely, " The Doelen," or " Bulls-eye," 
archery having been once the favourite national 
sport in Holland. Dutch inns are of course 
religiously clean. Sometimes the gnats are 
troublesome, but there is no danger of disco- 
vering the bed to be garrisoned by a menagerie 
of bloodthirsty w T ild beasts, and of finding 



41 



oneself used as a fleas' table d'hote. The 
Belle Vue, where my quarters were, is a capital 
house close to the Park, kept by a Scotchman 
called MaitlancL 

There being still an hour or so left of day- 
light, I wandered out, intending to explore 
Scheveningen (pronounced Skavening), a 
small watering place on the coast about three 
miles off. Thither the S'Gravenhagians 
greatly resort in summer, and plop in 
crowds into the sea, and subsequently, with 
the brisk appetite engendered by the dip, 
consume prodigious dinners at an hotel hard 
by, and listen to a band, 

* For music is wholesome, the doctors all think, 
For ladies that bathe and for ladies that drink," 

as the poet of the Bath Guide says. The 
sultriness of the afternoon, however, brought 
on a fit of laziness, so I gave up Scheveningen, 



42 



and happening to observe a path by a canal 
with a notice manifest to behold that " deze 
toegang ist verboden," the natural impulse, 
incident to the perverseness of mortal incli- 
nations, to do just what one " didn't ought," 
induced me to try it. As it proved anything 
but an exciting walk, and my only pleasure 
consisted in being engaged in doing something 
61 verboden," I was just considering the advisa- 
bility of a return, when suddenly a virulent 
looking individual with a big stick and a 
truculent-eyed mastiff, popped out of a 
cottage in a warm state of excitement, and 
poured forth a volume of Dutch abuse with 
surprising volubility. I responded by what I 
considered to be a rather ingenious and grace- 
ful little pantomimic performance — quite a 
charade in embryo — intended to depict my 
sincere concern at not being able to under- 



43 



stand what he meant (though his meaning 
was pretty tolerably clear it must be owned), 
and was peacefully proceeding onwards, 
when my friend went through a kind of 
broadsword-exercise performance with the 
stick in an alarmingly hostile manner just in 
front of my nose, so that the personal secur- 
ity of that important feature seemed seriously 
compromised. Of course there was no feign- 
ing to misunderstand that) the flourishing of 
a club over one's head being, as the Psalmist 
says, or rather as Tate and Brady say, 

" nature's voice, and understood 

Alike by all mankind." 

So I withdrew my nose and person generally 
from jeopardy, and meekly retreated, and 
finding a Eoman Catholic church in which 
service was going on, joined the congregation 
there. In this, as in other Dutch churches, 



44 



Roman Catholic and Protestant, they cut it 
rather fat, to use a Smithfield metaphor, in 
the assaults they make on the pockets of 
the devout on behalf of their numerous 
charities. An officer came round with a 
pole, having a little green bag suspended 
from its end, and shook it to demand contri- 
butions, so I dropped a small offering into it. 
Presently another came, and shook the bag 
at me in an impatient manner, but I con- 
sidered that a second demand so soon was an 
unwarrantable attack upon the exchequer, and 
therefore dropped nothing in but a smile. A 
third, equally peremptory, was enriched with 
precisely the same contribution as had been 
elicited by his predecessor, and which, however 
gratifying to his personal feelings, was not 
altogether so advantageous to him in a 
pecuniary point of view, though certainly it 



45 



was free from all tendency to produce a 
dangerous plethora in the ecclesiastical 
revenues. 

After church, tea. They bring you, in 
Holland, little teapots, quite gems of neat- 
ness in their way, with little copper kettles 
fussing and fizzing energetically in bright 
little brass pails of charcoal, so that the con- 
noisseur may enjoy the refreshing beverage 
properly made, and does not risk being nau- 
seated, as is too often the case in England, 
with a lukewarm potion of spoilt water. 
They likewise bring a kettle with a pan of 
charcoal to your bedroom if you ring for hot 
water. So that if you neglect to put the 
apparatus outside the door when you have 
done with it, there is a capital chance of 
your being found asphyxie in the morning, 
after the fashion in which French young 



46 



gentlemen are apt to dispose of themselves 
when they are crossed in love, or get any other 
serious screw loose in their arrangements. 

Early next morning I consigned myself un- 
resistingly to the guidance of a valet de place, 
and walked through the park to the palace in 
the wood. " The origin of the town/' says 
Murray , " may be traced to a hunting seat of 
the Counts of Holland, built here in 1250, 
and its name (S'Gravenhage) to the Count's 
Iiedge surrounding their park." The palace in 
the wood is now only occasionally used for 
balls and dinners. The only remarkables in 
it are some rooms the walls of which are 
hung with Japanese embroidery beautifully 
worked by hand, some paintings giving the 
effect of sculptures marvellously well, and 
a room covered with pictures by Jordaens. 
The Bosch, or wood, is about two miles long, 



47 



intersected with beautiful, cool, shady, walks, 
and, at the time of my visit, carpeted with 
a profusion of anemones ; the prettiest public 
pleasure ground that can possibly be. On 
Sundays, of course, all the beauty and 
fashion of the Hague is to be seen there, and 
a band plays. Every here and there are 
dotted cafes where people drink and smoke, 
each of which intimates its own particular 
recommendations in its name, such as "Buiten 
Lust," " Euim Zight," &c. 

Leaving the Palace, we proceeded to the 
Museum, which is not large, but excellent as 
to its contents. The pictures are almost all 
by Dutch masters, and afford a rich treat 
to those who, like myself, are fond of that 
school. Not having time to study a number 
properly, 1 confined myself principally to a 
protracted inspection of the two particular 



48 



lions, namely, " the great Paul Potter," and 
the portrait by Rembrandt of Professor Tulp 
dissecting; both of which pictures, but per- 
haps more especially the latter, exceeded my 
utmost expectations, although of the highest. 
Paul Potter's young bull is wonderful as a 
copy of nature. The only thing which my 
eye could pick out to quarrel with was the 
heavy mass of brown of a cow lying down 
just beyond the bull. Some self-accredited 
connoisseur, who, as is usual with those 
gentry, are always in raptures over what 
appears unnatural to the observer of less 
assumption, would doubtless exclaim, in 
answer to the above remark, " That mass of 
brown! why that's one of the most trans- 
cendant glories of the picture ! " Very 
possibly it may be. The body of the 
u dissectee " in the Van Tulp picture is a 



49 



marvellous representation of life, or more 
properly speaking, death. There is a capital 
collection of Japanese curiosities in the lower 
room of the museum. The Dutch are 9 or 
were, the only nation admitted into Japan, and 
therefore they have greater facilities than other 
nations for importing from that curious country. 
I believe they kept up their privileges in Japan 
by annually going through the ceremony of 
stamping on the cross. Among the articles 
that attracted my attention were some suits of 
armour of Japanese warriors, made as demonia- 
cal-looking as possible, to intimidate enemies. 
Each helmet was surmounted with a large pair 
of white horns ; an iron mask with a hideous 
grin was designed to cover the face, and bristled 
with a moustache of ultra-Haynau magnitude 
on the upper lip. 

The next thing to be done was to visit the 

E 



50 



New Palace, the royal residence, which, is in- 
teresting as containing several quite modern 
Dutch paintings. If these may be considered 
to indicate the condition of the art at this 
moment in Holland, it cannot be said that 
painting is at present very flourishing there. 
The Palace also contains a tolerable collection 
of old paintings, of which a certain Murillo, on 
the left in the great hall, appeared to me the 
most beautiful; or the most " charming," as 
certain ladies say of everything that pleases 
them, from a Murillo to a mutton chop. It is 
a pity that the Russians should have been 
allowed to take away so many good pictures as 
they lately did from this Palace, and carry 
them far out of the reach of the civilized world. 
I was pleased to stumble upon an old friend in 
the palace in the shape of a certain Claude, of 
which a capital pen and ink copy has been 



51 



made by the talented Marij Van Der Erie, and 
which is now in the collection of the Vrouw 
Pieter. 

After seeing the pictures &c 5 I wandered, 
"permiscuous like," as Mrs. Cluppins would say, 
into the Binnenhof, or inner court of the old 
Count's Palace, an ancient and rather triste- 
looking gothic hall, now used as a criminal 
court, and for the drawing of the State lotteries. 
For this latter purpose there are two gigantic 
wheels of fortune, which strangers would most 
likely guess to he some old barbarous instru- 
ments of torture. They precisely resembled 
Masters' patent rotatory knife-cleaners seen 
under a magnifying power of about 300. 
About the Hague may be seen many of 
the peculiar carts which the Dutch use, and 
which have no shafts or pole. A great wooden 
horn projects in front upon which the driver 

e 2 



52 



puts liis foot and thereby guides the vehicle. 
So that if the charioteer happens to be in the 
normal state of the British waggoner, a little 
"how cum'd I so?" or, as he would probably 
say of himself, u summut fresh in beer/' the 
cart wambles alarmingly from side to side, and 
not unfrequently, when the road lies along the 
top of a dam, peacefully subsides into the dyke 
below. There are some good private collections 
of pictures at the Hague, but having done the 
" Whole Duty of Tourist," and not having time 
for works of supererogation, I threw my bag 
on board the Trekschuit, or passage boat, for 
Ley den, in order to try the Dutch national 
mode of conveyance, or rather what was such 
till the railway put its pipe out, (to use a 
metaphor peculiarly appropriate to anything 
Dutch.) It is well worth while to make 
a few journeys by Trekschuit to see the 



53 

i 

country at leisure, and more especially the 
villas. 

The Trekschuit is a covered barge, usually 
divided into separate divisions, or bins, for three 
classes of passengers. The horse who draws it 
is ridden by a small boy who gets about a 
penny a stage for his exertions. The Dutch use 
longer and thinner ropes to pull their tow- 
boats with than we do. It would confer a 
material benefit on a very ill-used section of 
society, to wit, the barge horses, if anyone 
who may happen to combine a charitable 
disposition with the requisite mathematical 
attainments would reveal to the world what 
is the exact length of rope by which a barge 
can be towed to the best advantage. The 
question would be easy enough to solve if the 
problem were merely to balance the resistance 
necessarily kept up by the rudder when a short 



54 



rope is used, against so much of the force 
exerted by tlie weight of a long tow-line as can 
be resolved into a direction opposite to the 
line of traction. But a short rope has a propor- 
tionately aggravated tendency to pull the horse 
sideways off his legs, or give him a nasty crick 
in the back, and the precise value of this con- 
sideration, as diminishing the motive power, 
forms, of course, one of the most important con- 
ditions of the problem. 

It is pleasant enough, in cool weather, to sit 
on the lid of the cabin in a Trekschuit and 
dangle your legs over the side. But this is 
advisable, be it remembered, in cool weather 
only. For the top of the cabin is generally 
plastered with a sort of asphalte made of grit 
and tar, and this is addicted, under the 
influence of any high temperature, to become 
semiliquid and glutinous. Should you, there- 



55 



fore, have imprudently seated yourself on the 
nice, hard, clean, and sparkling, but treacherous, 
roof, which subsequently converts itself into a 
sort of birdlime of preternatural tenacity, why 
then " there you are!" and there you are likely 
to be, until you have released yourself by a 
certain desperate sacrifice which it is agitating 
to think of, and impossible to describe. But at 
all times, and in all temperatures, if you travel 
on the top of the cabin, unrelaxed attention 
must be given to what is ahead of you. Other- 
wise you will inevitably get relieved of your hat, 
and most probably also of your head 5 if you omit 
to duck sufficiently low when passing under the 
numerous bridges which overhang, at the height 
of a few feet only, the surface of the canals. 

The silent highway, on leaving the Hague, 
conducted us for about six miles through a 
long succession of villas distinguished by that 



56 



spruce and prim formality which is peculiar to 
Dutch residences, and each having its name 
according to the Dutch fashion. Most of these 
names were simple and unimaginative enough, 
consisting merely of every possible combination 
of Burg, Lust, Wijk, and Zight Sometimes, 
however, titles were to be met with which were 
quaint and fanciful, such as the following, 
"Met zoo kwaalijk,"— not so bad; " Het ver- 
maak is in't hovenieren," — there is pleasure in 
gardening; "De vleesch potten van Egypte," — 
the fleshpots of Egypt; " Mijn genegenheid is 
Voldaan," — my desire is satisfied; "Ons genoe- 
gen,"-— our pleasure; "Wei te vreede,"— well 
contented ; " Mijn lust en leven," — my pleasure 
and life; " Gemstelijk," — tranquil; "Vriend- 
schap en gezelschap," — friendship and socia- 
bility. There was also one which struck me as 
curious, namely, " Pas-geld," or Ready money. 



57 



The name was probably intended to indicate that 
the villa had been built with money acquired 
in a course of business conducted on the prin- 
ciple of " Small profits and quick returns." 
There are no fences round the gardens, as they 
are of course sufficiently protected from tres- 
passers by the ubiquitous moats. Each villa 
stands forty yards or so back from the canal, 
and at the bottom of each garden, on the edge 
of the water, is built a round room, called, as 
we should call it, a zomerhuis. This is the 
favourite sitting room of the family, as they 
can work or read there, and see all that passes 
on the " road " without noise or dust. Emerg- 
ing from the rows of villas, we came on open 
country, the fields on either side being polders, 
and much below our level. 

A polder is the dry basin of a marsh or lake, 
and is thus made. When the marsh has been 



58 



drained by large and powerful steam pumps, it 
is prevented from again filling by the cutting of 
a dyke in square lines round the lowest part of 
the bed, into which the water which accumulates 
at the bottom is pumped up. A second dyke is 
then made in parallel lines to the first, some 
little way above and behind it, and into this is 
raised the overflow from the ditch below, and 
the drainage from the intermediate space; and 
so by a series or tier of canals, one above the 
other, the water is at length raised to some 
great trunk stream which runs to the sea. But 
this is not all, for the water when it thus at 
length reaches the shore, is often so much below 
the mean level of the sea that it must be assis- 
ted over high dams by pumping, or else has to 
make its exit by sluice-gates only opened at low 
tide. Windmills are generally employed to work 
the hydraulic machines. " Pumps are seldom 



59 



used in draining, as the water is usually highly 
charged with silt, and is not required to be 
raised any very great height. The instruments 
employed are the scoop-wheel, the Archime- 
dian screw, and the inclined scoop-wheel or 
Eckhardt wheel." Of course the great system 
of dams and dykes is enormously expensive. It 
has been stated by Telford that the total cost of 
the hydraulic works between the Dollart and 
the Schelde amounted to £300,000,000 ! Con- 
sequently taxes are high and provisions dear, 
but proper precautions against invasion from 
such watchful and dangerous enemies as the 
floods are indispensable to the very existence of 
the country. Old Mr. Neptune, impatient as 
he is at being forcibly excluded from what he 
may consider with some propriety to be right- 
fully his own domain, would eagerly take 
advantage of the least remissness on the part 



60 



of the garrison of the territory, and swallow up 
them and their land at one mighty gulp. So 
he has to be, like the river which ran through 
Horace's estate, 

" Multa mole docendus aprico parcere campo 

The author of Hudibras describes Holland as 

" A country that draws fifty feet of water, 
In which men live as in the hold of nature, 
And when the sea does in upon them break 
And drowns a province, does but spring a leak." 

And, 

" A land that rides at anchor, and is moored, 
In which they do not live, but go aboard." 

A large tract near South Beverland was thus 
suddenly inundated some years ago, and its 
place on the map is now only marked as Ver- 
dronken land, or drowned land. Seventy-two 
villages were submerged, and a hundred 
thousand people drowned, in that disastrous 
flood. There is a regularly established Gov- 



61 



eminent College for the education of the 
water civil engineers, called the Waterstaafc. 
By cutting the dams the whole country could 
of course be laidainder water at any moment ; 
a ruinous and desperate expedient occasionally 
resorted to in the wars with the Spaniards. 

About three hours brought us the twelve miles 
from the Hague to Ley den. Eembrandt was 
born in a windmill near Leyden. He is 
supposed to have acquired the taste for the 
concentration and unity of light and shade 
which characterize his works from the peculiar 
optical effects to which he must have been 
accustomed in early life in his father's mill. 
Leyden is a large place, dull as an university 
town should be, with an interminable Hi°;h 
Street in which is a curious old Town Hall. 
There are also two huge barns of churches. 
The principal inn is the Goude Zon, the golden 



62 



sun, respectable and clean. There is the usual 
complement of canals round the town, with 
pleasant walks along the banks under the 
trees. An investment in a Dutch dictionary 
materially improved my breakfast the next 
morning, for the waiter, or "Jan," as that 
species of domestic animal is called in Holland, 
was a most unmitigated Dutchman, and un- 
derstood not a word of French or English. 
He considered himself, however, an accom- 
plished linguist from keeping up a continuous 
fire of " Monsieur ! " apropos to nothing par- 
ticular, and with only a demi-semi-quaver rest 
between each discharge. The only conceivable 
interpretation of his profuse use of this ejacu- 
lation was that being a bustling little man he 
adopted this mode, when not employed, of 
letting off the steam of his spare energy, or 
else intended it as a manifestation of his readi- 



63 



ness for active service, as much as if he had 
said, " Now then, Sir, what do you please to 
want? give your orders, my boy, speak the 
word, and here you are," &c. His face, mean- 
while, beamed with an amount of benevolence 
which in the aggregate would have sufficed 
to illuminate the features of the whole of 
the members of a considerable philanthropic 
society. His active urbanity, however, was 
totally unavailable to me. I wanted an egg, 
but the desire was incommunicable to him till 
the dictionary supplied the proper Dutch term 
for that comestible. My friend skipped away 
for it with the greatest alacrity, and brought it 
in triumph, not over boiled, as it had been, 
from all appearances, immersed for a quarter of 
a minute in lukewarm water. The views of 
foreigners generally on the subject of the 
boiling of eggs often differ widely from our 



64 



own. But the extraordinary productions which 
they put upon the traveller's breakfast table, 
and seriously and really, without intending any 
joke at all, expect him to consume, are after 
all much less obnoxious than the surprising 
ornithological clevelopements with which we 
are sometimes startled in this country. 

This day, Tuesday, was an incessant soaker, 
or what jocular meteorologists call a mouldy 
old day. I paddled, or rather waded, through 
the wet to see an Egyptian museum, where 
were, as is usual in such repositories, whole 
tribes of embalmed ladies and gentlemen, but 
here there were also mummies of fishes, birds, 
and dogs, comic to behold. They suggested 
the notion of putting a favourite old dog of 
my own in pickle for the benefit of future 
generations. Near the Egyptian Museum is 
the Japanese collection, the best thing of its 



65 



kind in the world, of one Dr. Siebold, a Pro- 
fessor in the University. The valet de place 
was horrified at my inflexible resolution not to 
visit the great Museum of Natural History, 
said to be the largest in the world. It may 
very likely be so, but the natural history which 
it was more particularly my object to see were 
the animated specimens in the Dutch streets 
and shops. The same valet's hair seemed 
ready to stand on end with dismay on my flatly 
negativing his proposal to visit the famous 
garden laid out by Linnaeus and some other 
great botanical gun. No doubt it is highly 
scientifically arranged, but the most resolute 
of the many " tourists," as the guide books 
call them, who devote themselves to martyr- 
dom in sightseeing, would allow that to have 
marched up to the knees in mud to behold the 
thrilling spectacle of a large number of sodden 

F 



66 



vegetables arrayed in mystical groups and rows 
would have been anything but exhilarating. 
So I took an early train to Haarlem. 

On approaching that town, the railway runs 
through gardens of the famous tulips which 
were just then in full splendour — "Deep tulips 
dashed with fiery dew/' as a popular poet calls 
them. " La tulipe noire " by Alexander 
Dumas is an amusing little story relating to 
the Dutch passion for tulips. Finding the 
great church at Haarlem closed, I got directed 
to the house of the principal nurseryman, 
bloemist en boomkweeker, as he termed him- 
self, who lived in a suburban street full of 
gentry of the same profession. He conducted 
me round his garden, and disclosed some of the 
hidden mysteries of the cultivation of tulips 
and jonquils. His house, too, was worth 
seeing as a paragon of cleanliness, quite at- 



67 



taining to that no plus ultra condition of 
spotlessness and final consummation of the 
effects of successful scrubbing which ima^i- 
native housemaids describe when they say that 
" you might eat your dinner off the floor any- 
where/' The hall was as usual paved with 
white marble, and the walls plated with Dutch 
tiles to the height of about four feet from the 
ground. But alas ! it was not the season to 
buy tulip-roots, which I, benighted cockney as 
I then was, did not know, so I contented 
myself with a packet of flower seeds bearing 
unpronounceable names, and had considerable 
misgivings that these would turn out to be the 
scientific terms for daisies and dandylions. 
There was a public performance on the great 
organ at one o'clock, but it was not very satisfac- 
tory. The organist played but indifferently, 
and did not put his instrument through its 



68 



paces to give us an idea of 

u The storm their high-built organs make, 
And thunder-music rolling, shake 

The prophets blazoned on the panes," 

The organ seemed to have a good tone, but not 
equal to that of the monster stentor at Fribourg 
in Switzerland. It is imposing from its pro- 
digious size. The vox humana stop is fine, 
and there are some varieties of it. One of 
these gave the notion of a number of men 
singing, as admirably as the corresponding stop 
at Fribourg imitates voices of a higher pitch. 
The town hall at Haarlem is curious. In one 
street was a funny signal, called the "kraam- 
kloppertje," which is peculiar to Holland, and 
more especially so to this town, namely, a lace 
pincushion, or rather the top of one, nailed to 
a house door to show that a lady within is in 
the straw. These pincushion tops are of a 



69 



variety of colours, each colour having a known 
signification to the initiate ((fwvavra vwerlm 
u which have a voice for the wise/' as Pindar 
says) as to whether a boy or girl has come into 
the world, and whether the mother and child 
are doing well. There is another odd custom 
in Holland in connexion with the same subject, 
which is this. When a birth takes place, 
etiquette requires that the friends of the 
family should call at the house to make en- 
quiries, and be then regaled with bread and 
butter. If the new-born article be a male, 
rough white sugar-plums are spread over the 
bread, but if a female, smooth ones. I after- 
wards bought as a curiosity some of the sugar- 
plums manufactured for this purpose, and had 
a flirtation on the occasion with a very inter- 
esting dear little Vrouw, so clean ! who 
supplied the same. But we found it was 



70 



rather the pursuit of flirting under difficulties, 
since soft savings don't improve by being 
strained through an interpreter, so we were 
obliged to be content with looking unutterable 
things at one another over the counter instead. 

Since then I have adopted the more judicious 
plan of dispensing with an interpreter on 
occasions of this description, and talking 
simple English. It is all the better for not 
being understood, because one can smilingly 
and insinuatingly tell a Dutch beauty, by way 
of a compliment, that she is anything in the 
world, from a Batavian Peri to a nasty beast. 
She innocently takes everything on trust, and 
owns the soft impeachment of being a little 
goose with as much sweet confusion, and as 
many interesting blushes, as she does the 
highest flown expressions of warm admiration 
which the most excursive fancy can suggest. 



71 



One's resources of complimentary phraseology 
are thus materially extended. 

Close to Haarlem is an enormous lake, the 
Haarleemer Meer, now in process of draining 
by means of three prodigious steam engines, 
the Dutch Chambers having sanctioned the 
undertaking four or five years ago. The land 
gained will be about twenty-four times the 
size of the area of the city of Amsterdam ! i. <?. , 
about seventy square miles. The lake was 
about twelve feet deep. It is a pity that a polder 
like this could not be sent to the Great 
Exhibition, as there would have been nothing 
more curious among the marvels of human 
industry there collected. Since that last 
sentence was written in 1851 the draining of 
the Haarleemer Meer has been actually com- 
pleted, and in July last (1860) I observed 
large form buildings standing on a spot where 



72 



nine years before I had seen ships sailing. 
Half w eg "halfway" between Haarlem and 
Amsterdam is the place for that famous dish 
water zouche. Near this I got an opportunity 
of seeing something of the formation of a dam. 
Piles of stones are first thrown down in un- 
limited quantities, then come layers of clay 
and mud, held together by sand, then earth 
and turf, and perhaps trees, with a road 
between them. 

The army of windmills at a small town oppo- 
site Amsterdam, on the other side of the river 
Y, called Saardam, or more properly Zaandam, 
where Peter the Great learnt ship-building, is 
very singular. Windmills are invariably a pro- 
minent feature in a Dutch landscape, and no 
wonder, for they are said to number 9,000 in 
Holland. Near Gouda I was able to count a 
hundred without turning round. Many of 



73 



tliem are three times as large as ours (what 
Pindar would call an fyiySw aA<ro^) ? and 
almost of as imposing a size as those marvel- 
lous structures represented in old prints of Don 
Quixote's encounter with the windmills. Some 
are thatched down the sides, which gives them 
the appearance of having a rough fur coat on, 
and several are ornamented and christened. The 
Dutch having no coal, and only peat, where- 
with to work steam engines, use wind power for 
all their manufactories. The ends of the 
sails of Dutch windmills turn up more than 
ours do. * Which model is right ? The Dutch 
ought to know a thing or two about wind- 
mills, and on the other hand we English 
are no fools in mechanical contrivances. Pro- 
bably, therefore, that simple little matter would 
be found to be well arguable both ways. Dutch 
sails hold more wind, but then some of it works 



74 



at a mechanical disadvantage. Now that the 
proper pitch of screw for steamboats, which 
constituted pretty nearly the same problem, 
has been ascertained, the sails-of-windmills- 
question must be susceptible of further 
elucidation. 

Amsterdam is a stately city of very great 
size, containing a busy population of about 
212,000 persons. In its general appearance 
it is as amphibious a place as Venice, being 
intersected of course by canals in all directions. 
The shops are substantial, and occasionally 
smart, particularly one draper's which seemed 
to me more magnificent than anything of the 
kind at Paris, but not worthy to be named 
in comparison with the splendours in London. 
Probably in all such establishments there is 
a similar complement of bland gentlemen 
behind the counters, with spotless white neck- 



i 



cloths and insinuating address, to beguile half- 
reluctant ladies into wild investments in lace 
and ribbons, and thereby plunge their ill-fated 
husbands into hopeless abysses of pecuniary 
embarrassment. It is an amusing sight to 
stand, regardless of commands from peremp- 
tory policemen to "move on/' at a certain 
spot in Tottenham Court Road, and peep 
through the glass door of Shoolbred's at the 
corps of ministering spirits behind the counter 
there. Observe one of them — him who is 
attending to that corpulent old lady in the 
snuff-coloured bonnet, who looks so unspeak- 
ably wretched on the narrow perch of a high- 
backed chair, though trying with all her might 
to look happy and secure. With what winning 
and tender grace he propounds the enquiry as 
to what she may be pleased to want ! With 
what surprising manual dexterity he whisks 



76 



out a roll of silk, or calico, or flannel, as the 
case may be, and lias measured out and snipped 
off the desired length in infinitely less than no 
time ! With what an air of confidential and 
tender solicitude he asks what may be 
the next article he may have the pleasure of 
showing her this morning ! " Nothing in 
sarsnets, Madam? Now this is a very tasty 
thing indeed, and very moderate, yes, we can 
sell you this as low as ninepence, the pattern, 
too, is exceedingly chaste. Now this also is 
a superb thing, and the colours are singularly 
rich, this would particularly become you. 
Madam, and it is also a very unusual bargain." 
But the lady, scopulis surdior Icari, is inflexible 
in rigid self-denial and economical resolutions, 
so the insidious blandishments of the tempter 
fall without effect. Yes, even when he holds 
up the last new thing in satin, and softly 



77 



sighing, murmurs " sweet thing ! " with gentle 
emotion, she remains grimly impregnable to 
persuasion, and is wholly unmoved by his last 
despairing appeal of " nothing in flannel- 
lings?" And when you begin to think that he 
must at last be getting a little tired with his 
exertions, with what unimpaired alacrity he 
whips out a pen from a curly recess in the 
auricular demesnes, and then, all undaunted 
by the perilous addition of fractions to be en- 
countered in the very first column, dashes 
through complicated arithmetical calculations 
with twenty-ready- reckoner speed and accu- 
racy ! But he hasn't half done yet. With 
what an appearance of something like sorrow- 
ful deprecation he receives the money, as 
though he didn't like taking it, and was half 
inclined to protest against it altogether, and 
obeying the generous impulse of his heart 



78 



make a present of the goods out and out ! 
But he has prevailed on himself to take it, and 
has slipped off for change, which he brings 
hack, possibly in a neat envelope, and then, as 
if bent on raising the obligations under which 
he has laid her of the bonnet to a climax, 
skips in feverish haste to open the door for her 
(don't try to anticipate him, ma'am, for it 
would break his heart), and bows her out with 
a smile of ineffable sweetness and amiability. 
But stay a moment longer just to look at the 
cashier, who inhabits the pew, or bin, or sentry 
box, in the middle of the shop, and deals out 
change to a throng of impatient applicants 
faster than old centimanus Gyges himself, with 
his hundred hands, could have done it. Yet 
he is always calm and collected, although the 
very nucleus of the bustling whirl of the whole 
establishment, and called as many ways at 



70 



once as would have reduced a thousand Figaros 
to the last extremity of distraction and de- 
spair. But now you must keep a little out of 
sight, and take only a sly and modest peep 
at the elderly gentleman with the urbane, yet 
strong-minded, countenance, who paces slowly 
up and down the nave, so to call it, of the 
shop, and has now just turned his face towards 
us. He is one of the partners in the business, 
or at any rate a high potentate in the estab- 
lishment, and saunters in dignified leisure, 
awing and subduing the throng around him. 
Like " the staid lieutenant," whose look, gait, 
&c, Byron so graphically describes by a single 
word. What unimpeachable integrity is writ- 
ten on his face ! How intensely respectable 
his massive watch chain ! What irreproachable 
purity of character is shadowed forth by the 
unsullied spotlessness of his very boots ! He 



80 



is a rigid and inflexible disciplinarian however, 
and frowns grimly on the slightest breach of 
propriety. But though such a "Jupiter onini- 
potens," and sometimes also u tonans," he can 
be bland, too, nay even condescending, to those 
who show themselves worthy of such notice by 
becoming his customers. Just at this moment, 
see, he is bowing with graceful courtesy to a 
young woman with a basket on her arm who 
is leaving the shop, and dismisses the happy 
object of such favour all in a glow of pride and 
exultation at the distinction. But this is a 
digression. 

There are at Amsterdam three canal streets, 
perhaps the finest of the kind in the world, 
partly encircling the town in parallel curves 
two or three miles long. A new Exchange has 
lately been built (with great difficulty, as it 
would persist in sinking into the mud as fast as 



81 



they raised it), where the merchants meet 
every afternoon at three o'clock, every one who 
comes late being fined. This being the season 
at . which the fashionables of Amsterdam leave 
town, the contents of several of the houses 
were being turned out into barges for trans- 
mission into the country. One of the funniest 
sights in Amsterdam are the sedan chairs, 
called sleep-koets, drawn by horses, but with- 
out wheels. It was formerly the custom for 
the driver to run by the side, and occa- 
sionally lubricate the stones with drops of 
oil or tallow to diminish the friction, but 
this comical practice is disappearing. I didn't 
try this very original, or rather aboriginal, 
mode of conveyance, but rather regret not 
having done so, in order to have discovered 
whether the drivers' estimation of distances, 
and their arithmetical calculations in respect 

G 



82 



of fares, are as inscrutable as those of the 
British " cabby." 

Before having been long in the town, I saw 
an individual in a long black cloak with a 
cocked hat and sword (something between a 
Spanish caballero and a parish beadle), walk- 
ing in a prodigious hurry. This was an 
u aanspreker," or undertaker, on a mission 
to announce a death to the friends of the 
deceased. It may be mentioned that Dutch 
funerals, more particularly in Friesland, are 
sometimes attended by certain very odd cus- 
toms. In some cases monev is oiven to the 
party at the grave as drink money, or beer 
is supplied to them at the late residence of 
the deceased. A funeral conducted under such 
conditions, if not professedly a convivial meet- 
ing, yet assumes of course the genial and fes- 
tive character of a cosy little social reunion. 



83 



The slight pensiveness which may possibly at 
first be shed upon the proceedings by the 
particular nature of the occasion is promptly 
dispelled by the cheering influences of double 
stout. If the beer supplied to the mourners 
should happen to be as mfinitesimally small 
as that which they used, to give us at Win- 
chester College, it might truly be said that the 
mourners first water the bier, and then that the 
converse of this proceeding is gone through by 
the beer watering them. Sometimes also the 
company at a Dutch funeral have what is de- 
scribed in the painfully graphic vernacular of 
British blackguards as " a regular blowout." 
For half a sheep is roasted for the party, and 
the undertaker presides, and says grace. This 
reminds one of the fish dinners at Billingsgate, 
where the waiter officiates as chaplain, and 
blesses the eighteenpennyworths of sole and 



84 



salmon with an impressive solemnity for which 
no extra charge whatever is made. 

My quarters at Amsterdam were at the Hotel 
Doelen in the Doelen Straat, a good house, but- 
expensive. At the table d'hote there I made 
acquaintance with two young Englishmen en- 
gaged in making arrangements for the under- 
taking of bringing a supply of water from 
Utrecht to Amsterdam by pipes. At present 
they are very ill off in that respect at Amster- 
dam, for it is 

" Water, water, everywhere, 
And not a drop to drink ! " 

as the auncient marinere said. The little they 
have is fetched in gallon jugs from some miles 
off (the gallon costs about fourpence), or else 
is brought in covered barges, called "Leggers," 
which are filled till they sink to the level of 
the surface of the canal, and are then towed to 



Amsterdam. As the water is pumped out, the 
barge gradually emerges again, and when 
empty is towed back for more. After dinner 
the watermen and myself went together to the 
French theatre to hear the Huguenots, which 
was well done, but leaving much to be desired. 
Gro£ with the watermen, and then bed. 

At intervals through the night at Amster- 
dam a watchman comes down the street and 
springs his rattle, and performs a kind of Gre- 
gorian chaunt, in connection, probably, with 
the meteorological observations which those 
gentry are in the habit of reporting. Our 
friend who patrolled the Doelen Straat on this 
particular evening was most dismally hoarse, as 
if he had all the dampest night fogs that had 
ever risen from the canals in his throat, and 
from the choky nature of the performance, he 
seemed to be gasping forth his intelligence 



86 



through a multitudinous series of thick wrap- 
pers drawn over his mouth. 

Up in good time next morning, and having 
done an apology for a hurried breakfast, and 
chartered a commissionaire (these are neces- 
sary evils in Dutch cities), I set off to see 
the town. Having explored all the remark- 
able parts, we proceeded to view the Old 
Church, in which there is nothing worthy of 
much notice, except, perhaps, the enormous 
sounding-board over the pulpit, but which is 
common in a degree to all Dutch churches. 
The same may be said of the New Church, 
but in the course of exploring this I be- 
came acquainted with a curious custom of 
the Dutch in their marriage ceremonies. A 
kind of pew is railed off in the Church, 
and this is carpeted and decorated according 
to the means of the victims. Here they 



87 



stand to be turned off, as we expressively 
describe that process. The poorer folk have 
the noose adjusted early in the morning. As 
the day advances, the richer couples are 
strung up, and about three o'clock the great 
swells come on for execution, each class pay- 
ing according- to the hour. 

From the Churches we proceeded to the 
Palace, which externally is a very imposing 
building, surmounted by a gigantic statue of 
Atlas supporting a huge globe, like Mr. 
Wyld's turned inside out. The interior of 
the Palace is not remarkable, with the excep- 
tion of the ball room, which is 100 feet high, 
and affords " ample space and verge enough " 
for legs of the most excursive temperament 
to perform their evolutions. One might tol- 
erate here, without a murmur, those pests of 
society who perversely waltz holding their arms 



88 



stretched stiff out at full length like signposts 
or gallows. Some of the doors about the 
building are adorned with appropriate little 
figures. One room, which was formerly a 
lady's boudoir, is decorated with a pair of 
doves billing over the entrance. Another, 
which was formerly the office for auditing 
bankrupts' accounts, bears a figure of Icarus, 
prone in precipitous descent, over the thres- 
hold, symbolling, rather happily, calamitous 
speculative enterprise. The view from the top 
of the building is very fine. I saw a broad bay 
of the sea in which was a ship of 100 tons or 
more sailing about. The bay was all but circum- 
vented by a dam, the ends of which appeared 
to be rapidly approaching an union, so that 
anyone who visits Amsterdam some months 
hence will no doubt find that identical bay a 
rich green polder with its dykes and windmills, 



89 



and full of fat cows and sheep, the converse 
of the state of things described in Horace 
Car. I. 2, 

The next thing to be seen was the Museum 
of Pictures, a most beautiful collection. Many 
of the pictures, as at Berlin, are hung on large 
shutters, so that they can be drawn out into the 
most advantageous light, which is a great con- 
venience. The one of deservedly the greatest 
reputation is the Schuttersmaaltijd, or the 
Banquet of the Musqueteers, by Van Der 
Heist, and represents the Burgher guard of 
Amsterdam and their leader, Wits, met to 
celebrate the treaty of Westphalia. There are 
twenty-five figures the size of life, all portraits. 
Kugler says, " In this colossal picture we see 
the full length of the splendid table with all its 
joyous guests. The captain in a black dress 
sits tranquilly in the centre, turned to the 



90 



spectator, with one leg thrown over the other, 
and in his hand the blue silk banner with the 
arms of the city. Around, are his stout com- 
panions in arms in admirable groups, jesting 
and revelling, drinking, and pressing each 
other's hands to their hearts' content. The 
most varied individual character, rough, jovial, 
and active, but faithfully reflected from nature, 
the greatest richness in the materials of the 
glittering arms and drinking vessels, the solid, 
broad, free, handling, all combine to give this 
work an unique value among pictures of its 
class." The same work is characterised by Sir 
Joshua Reynolds as " perhaps the finest picture 
of portraits in the world, and comprehending 
more of those qualities which make a perfect 
portrait than any other he had ever seen." 

Being an amateur of fishes, I visited the 
fish-market, and found it well supplied with 



91 



the enormous perch which are caught in the 
canals. In the canals, that is to say, outside 
the town. For the whole drainage of Amster- 
dam is poured into the canals within the city, 
and the water in these remains unchanged 
otherwise than to the very slight degree in 
which that effect is brought about by the action 
of the tides, and by the languid oozing out sea- 
wards which takes place after a flood of rain. 
Consequently the water in question is apt to 
become, especially in hot and dry seasons, a 
semi-fluid substance, as gummy and glutinous 
as South African port, and pretty nearly per- 
haps as nasty too. And those iridescent effects 
which are presented by the unctuous surfaces of 
stagnant pools are particularly vivid in these 
Amsterdam canals. So that although there are 
fish of preternatural vitality who actually con- 
trive to "make a live of it," as we say in 



92 



Sussex, in so slimy an element, yet they are 
distinguished, as might be expected, by a muddy 
lusciousness of flavour which is too strong even 
for the stomachs of hungry cats. The water in 
the great ship canal is brackish, so that it does 
not produce many fish. The great canal would 
be startled at its own condition on Sunday 
afternoons if it were as close to London as it is 
to the Dutch metropolis, and if there were a 
few more fish in it. For, like the Thames at 
Richmond on a fine evening in the punting 
season, it would find itself converted into one 
vast, thick, congeries of fish hooks, with a 
little water toilsomely struggling to permeate 
through the interstices of the mass. 

Hard by the fish-market is a curious old 
gate of the town, close to which are two 
unaccountable square sockets in the pavement. 
In these holes, every three months, two pillars 



93 



are fixed, and on them a stage on which ac- 
counts are settled with criminals by whipping. 
I have understood Mr. Henry of Bow Street, 
who must be admitted to be the best pos- 
sible authority on such a matter, to say that 
he considers the infliction of corporal punish- 
ment to be undesirable in any case whatever. 
Otherwise one would have been disposed to 
anticipate very salutary results from what may 
be called " local expostulation " in the case 
of criminals whose feelings prove inaccessible 
to remonstrance at any other point. 

In Amsterdam, as in other cities of Holland, 
shops for the sale of female ornaments abound. 
I supposed that certain broad plates used as 
ornaments for the top and sides of the head, 
must be of brass, but was assured that they 
were entirely of gold, and cost from £7 to 
£10 apiece, and sometimes even more. They 



94 



descend as heirlooms in families. The sold- 

o 

smiths' shops are periodically visited by 
government scrutineers who lodge informa- 
tions against the proprietors if alloy is sold. 
The Frieslanders wear the most picturesque 
costume, and these broad plates of gold give 
them rather the appearance of being helmetecl. 
The Dutch costumes, generally, are very pretty 
and various ; much more so than those of the 
Swiss at the present day, at least the women's, 
for the men dress like John Bulls. Each dis- 
trict has its own particular characteristic attire 
and ornaments which are rigidly adhered to. 
There are altogether twenty-four varieties. 
Some of the women wear contrivances at each 
side of their eyes which look like blinkers. 
Dumas somewhere or other describes a certain 
individual as 66 precede d'un nez magnifique." 
Similarly, Dutch women may be said to be 



95 



precedees by structures of hair and gold. They 
are alleged also to be suivees de — well, never 
mind that. This religious adherence to these 
quaint fashions probably does not so much 
betoken a mere pastoral simplicity as a sort 
of proud Toryism. I don't mean by Toryism 
the heavy and perverse stupidity which regards 
all improvements with the same sort of anta- 
gonistic spirit of abhorrence with which a 
G-erman would receive a suggestion that he 
should wash himself. I mean, rather, the 
feeling of just pride and satisfaction with which 
the Dutch view their own social condition, and 
their position among nations in the world's 
family circle. They have good reason to feel 
a grateful and jealous attachment to every 
minute detail of the whole system of life and 
manners from which so excellent a result has 
sprung. This feeling seems to explain the 



96 



scrupulous and devout strictness with which 
the primitive manners of their forefathers are 
cherished among them, and the careful exacti- 
tude with which ancient peculiarities, not to 
say extravagancies, in costume, are preserved 
inviolate from generation to generation. 

After the last paragraph was written it 
occurred to my recollection that there is one 
point in which a departure from ancient 
fashions has taken place. Namely in this, that 
as far as I know, Dutchmen of the present day 
do not encase themselves in more than a single 
pair of inexpressibles at a time. The corre- 
sponding reduction which has taken place in the 
number of petticoats simultaneously worn by 
the fair sex has been already adverted to. In 
former days it was customary for a rich Myn- 
heer to bear about on his person the whole 
contents of his wardrobe for the time being. 



97 



Mr. Ten Broeck, or "Ten Breeches/' whose 
name figures so prominently in the litera- 
ture of the turf may well be proud of his 
ancestry, the founder of the family having 
obviously, as the words imply, distinguished 
himself by what must have been, so to speak, 
a rich exuberance of attire, calculated to rivet 
the attention of even a many-trousered public. 
Dutchmen, therefore, of a century or two back 
were far from subscribing to the careless and 
independent system of philosophy whose creed 
is embodied in the stanza 

Then why should we quarrel for riches, 

Or any such glittering toys ? 
A light heart and thin pair of breeches 

Will go through the world, my brave boys ! 

After having rummaged Amsterdam we 

ferried across the river Y (pronounced Eye) 

to Buiksloot, where begins the great ship-canal 

which runs to the Helder, a distance of fifty- 
EE 



98 



one miles. At the surface it is 124 feet wide? 
and at the bottom 31 feet, and 21 feet deep. 
It has only three locks, one at each end, and 
one at Purmerende. The level of the canal at 
Buiksloot is ten feet below the mean height of 
the sea, and of course very much below high 
tides. The cost of the work was nearly 
£1,500,000. By means of this canal vessels 
of any tonnage can easily get up from the 
German ocean to Amsterdam at all times, 
instead of running the chance of sticking for 
an indefinite term in the deep mud of the 
Zuider Zee, rather an unsatisfactory position 
for those on board. It is indeed a grand 
national undertaking, and would do credit to 
a far mightier nation than the Dutch. 

At Buiksloot, not having time to walk to 
Broek, and not being desirous of paying the 
heavy charge demanded for a regular carriage, 



99 



I with some difficulty prevailed on an innkeeper 
to let me have a pony chaise. It resembled in 
some respects a peculiar breed of vehicle that 
we used to call at Winchester a rattledum. 
The Lilliputian steed, however, who was destined 
to draw it did not approve of the arrangement 
at all, for we saw him galloping round a neigh- 
bouring polder, making frantic splashes through 
canals, and recklessly attempting impossible 
jumps, in his endeavours to escape ; hotly pur- 
sued by a pursy little Dutch boy so exceeding 
short as to the lower limbs that he looked like 
an oyster-barrel on castors. Nature really 
hadn't given him anything like his fair due 
in respect of legs, so that his capacity for rapid 
locomotion was exceedingly limited. In spite, 
however, of such physical disadvantages, he 
scuffled along with unyielding pertinacity, and 
appeared to be animated by some extravagant 



100 



hopes, wholly unwarranted by any reasonable 
probability, that he was going to effect the 
capture. Mr. Pony was (how. I am not in a 
position to state) at last caught, and brought 
up in triumph : so steamy that he walked in a 
moist fog. and so utterly rough that his ap- 
pearance was about equally suggestive of a 
door-mat and a Russian bear. His tail (he 
hadn't anything particular in that way to speak 
of) was tied up in a tight nob. and yet the 
hairs blew away so fast that I expected shortly 
to see nothing but a bare little fleshy peg 
remaining. He manifested, of course, deep 
disgust ar being forced into the shafts, and was 
disposed to be quite pettish, bur ultimately 
yielded to expostulation and the stroking of 
his nose, and testified the renewal of an ami- 
cable frame of mind by depositing a small cake 
of froth on my coat sleeve. Just as we started 



101 



they threw into the chaise what appeared to be 
a brick, but it turned out, of all things in the 
world, to be our Bucephalns's dinner ! He 
proved a jolly little fellow, and tugged at the 
reins manfully, a proceeding fraught with peril 
to the said reins, which were in fact two old 
green bell-ropes. 

Fifty minutes or so brought us to Broek, by 
common consent the cleanest village in the 
world. Here used to be made great numbers 
of the little round Dutch cheeses. At the en- 
trance of the village is a warning not to smoke 
without a cover to the pipe for fear of making 
a litter with the ashes ! There are no carriage 
roads through the place, but the footpaths are 
all paved with clinkers, and regularly washed, 
with flannel probably, and then strewed with 
sand in patterns like Alum Bay bottles. Pos- 
sibly they may go so far as to puff-ball them, 



102 



like babies, after their ablutions, but I omitted 
to investigate this point. All the houses have, 
in addition to the door for ordinary use, 
another, a little raised above the ground, and 
remarkable from having no handle. This door 
is only opened twice during the occupancy of 
each successive tenant ; once when he brings 
his bride home, and once when he is carried 
out through it to his last home in the church- 
yard. 

My guide took me to a farm-house, and 
showed me first the cowhouse where were 
various ingenious devices in the way of troughs 
for preventing the least un cleanliness. All the 
cows stood in a row, with their tails tied 
towards the ceiling by ropes to prevent their 
getting dirty. The hair of the upper part of 
the tail is clipped close with the same view, and 
the wisp at the end is regularly washed every 



103 



day. But the inside of the farm-house was the 
marvel. The kitchen was very snug and pretty 
with its goodly store of Delft crockery ranged 
around it. The fire blazed in a brass cauldron, 
here the substitute for a grate; but the quaintest 
things were the chairs, which were, according 
to the custom of the country hereabouts, 
balanced against the wall instead of standing up 
straight on their proper legs as sober orthodox 
chairs are expected to do. But oh! the sanc- 
tum or shrine of neatness beyond, kept for 
grand occasions, and at other times only 
entered once a week by the mistress of the 
house to be reverentially scoured! Its most 
prominent ornament was a Dutch clock, really 
aristocratic and handsome, and as unlike as 
possible to the daubed horrors which we here 
unjustly dignify with that title. On the table 
was a pair of painted sabots, worn only on high 



104 



holidays. Seeing a heap of tin boxes in a 
corner, I enquired what they might be for, and 
was told they were to be sent off with the 
daughter of the mistress of the house to start 
house-keeping with, as she was to be married 
the next week. I dropped a contribution into 
the money-box for luck, and made through the 
interpreter the best speech I could churn at 
short notice to the mother of the intended bride 
expressive of my wishes for her daughter's hap- 
piness. This appeared to gratify the good old 
soul, as she repeated Danke wohl Mynheer 
several times, and produced a bottle of anisette 
to drink the bride's health ; a glass of which 
execrable fluid I managed to dispose of with 
exemplary fortitude; it is to be hoped without 
manifesting as deep disgust as that with which a 
similar victim, a certain old spaniel at our sick- 
house at Winchester, used, vicariously, to take 



105 



pills, draughts, and even embrocations ! I beg, 
however, solemnly and emphatically to deny 
ever having acted as administrator of such to 
the ill-fated Dash. He disappeared at last with- 
out favouring the medical world with any of his 
observations, which would have been invalu- 
able, since nobody ever attained so complete 
an acquaintance, from personal experience, with 
every item in the British Pharmacopoeia, in 
every possible variety of combination, as he. 
The sensations of the ill-starred Dash were pro- 
bably too complicated for accurate definition. 
My feelings, after the anisette, were those of 
one who has inadvertently swallowed a box of 
lucifer matches, and thereby had a fiery heart- 
burn kindled within him. 

After this, we visited the Lion of Broek, 
the clergyman's garden, round which we were 
conducted by a sweet little vrouwlein quite 



106 



transparently clean. The worthy pastor's 
garden was intersected by numerous little 
canals, bestrid by fanciful little bridges, and 
sprinkled with Lilliputian temples, so that it 
looked like some Italian scene viewed through 
a telescope turned the wrong way. In summer^ 
two tin swans adorn a miniature lake, and a 
deal clergyman fishes ; quite as intelligent an 
ecclesiastic as some of the luminaries who adorn 
our Establishment, to judge from their dis- 
courses. At this time, one of the birds was 
gone to have a leak stopped, and his reverence 
was also absent for a new coat (of paint). 
There was also a truculent-looking image with 
a gun, sitting in a corner to represent a sports- 
man, or, possibly, as it was decorated with a 
farouche moustache of impossible magnitude, 
a bandit, put there to give a touch of wildness 
and romance to the softer illusions of the scene. 



107 



In one place was a cottage completely fur- 
nished, and inhabited by figures the size of 
life, consisting of an old woman spinning, an 
old man turning the wheel, and a clog. The 
dear little guide wound the cottage up, and the 
man began to turn the wheel, the old lady to 
spin, and the dog to open his mouth and bark ; 
at least he made the conventional imitation of 
a bark, a sort of spasmodic croup, with a loud 
accompaniment of ticking and wheels. When 
the machinery is in very apple-pie order, the 
old man 'smokes also. Similar figures are seen 
in many Dutch gardens, but they are not 
usually multiplied so extravagantly as in his 
reverence's domains at Broek. Alas ! for the 
departure of the moving wax-work in Wind- 
mill Street, which was a similar entertainment, 
and whose place is now supplied by attractions 
of a more exceptionable character. Alas ! for 



108 



the departure of the dwarf who described the 
figures, and gave such astounding versions of 
classical biography! " The first group on the 
right represents Coriolanus before the walls of 
Eonie. His mother is a beseechin' of him to 
spare his country. Observe the motion of his 
eyes ; the heavin' of his chest ; the quiverin' of 
his leg. Observe, too, the motion of the soldier 
behind him. I suppose you think as that ere 
man's alive. Lord love you, he's no more alive 
than you are. The next group on the right 
represents the meeting of Pope Leo the Tenth 
with Mark Anthony after the battle of Nava- 
rino," &c. &c. My friend's solution of the 
mystery why people went round in the centri- 
fugal railway, (for that was an additional 
attraction in the exhibition), and didn't tumble 
out, was quite an original development of the 
cause of that phenomenon. " Here, ladies and 



109 



gen'lemen'' (the brilliant circle consisting gene- 
rally of myself), "yon see the centrifewgaJ rail- 
way y which acts on the principle as all bodies 
which is whirled round in a circle has always a 
tendency to fly towards the centre!" After all, 
my poor friend's notion of centrifugal force was 
in truth hardly more vague and incorrect than 
that almost universally entertained. Some of 
the trees in the garden had their trunks 
scraped. In the North of Holland they are 
often painted, like ancient British warriors : to 
keep down insects, as they say. but more likely, 
if the truth were known, for ornament. Dutch 
trees, when daubed with colour and close- 
shaven like convicts' heads, have as little of 
the semblance of vegetable nature left about 
them as certain mere collections of tailoring 
and cosmetics which call themselves military 
men, talking exhaustedly, and labouring, as 



110 



they press you to observe, under a deplorable 
imbecility of intellect, have of the vigour and 
dignity of virile humanity. 

Having pretty well explored Broek, we 
harnessed Mr. Pony again, who brought us on 
the wings of the wind back to Buiksloot, 
where he arrived with no material tail left to 
boast of, and minus one or two of his shoes : 
very mettlesome, however, on the strength of 
the delicious brick on which he had regaled 
himself while waiting. From Buiksloot, back 
to Amsterdam by Trekschuit and a steam 
ferry. The harbour of Amsterdam has a 
double row of piles running parallel with the 
shore, with openings at intervals overlooked 
by a guard-house. This is a good plan to 
prevent smuggling in boats. Dinner, and then 
to the great Theatre which is far away from 
everything on the outskirts of the town. It is 



Ill 



of very great size, but too plain, and showed 
" a beggarly account of empty boxes/' al- 
though the acting seemed to be not amiss. 
The unlucky commissionaire, haying only Dutch 
legs, was about this time quite knocked up by 
the dance I had led him all day. 

I had just turned into bed at a very late 
hour, when a red glare of fire in the sky sud- 
denly made itself visible from my window, so 
I threw on my clothes again as quickly as 
possible, and, guided by the flames, which shot 
higher and higher each moment, ran towards 
the spot. There was, however, already a cor- 
don militaire formed in a wide circle round the 
place, so that nobody could approach. The 
thick crowds of people thronging the sides and 
bridges of a long, wide, canal, and some church 
spires near, brought out into strong relief in 
the glare of the conflagration, had a most pic- 



112 



turesque effect. The building proved to be a 
large turf magazine, which was exactly the best 
possible material for a bonfire, and the night 
was propitious, being pitch dark. The flames 
were at length subdued, owing, probably, to 
the convenience of the canal water so close at 
hand. 

Off very early the next morning to Utrecht, 
and established myself at the " Pays Bas," as 
capital an hotel as can possibly be, and said to 
be the best in Holland. Utrecht is well off for 
hotels, for the Belle Yue, it is said, is also 
much to be recommended. The Jan at the 
Pays Bas amused me by saying that he had 
heard from good authority that there were 
20,000 " Americas" coming to London to the 
Great Exhibition, and he quite agreed to my 
remark in reply that in that case London 
would be very full. Utrecht is a nice, pretty, 



113 



cheerful place, with good shops, and encircled 
by lovely boulevards. There are the fragments 
of a very fine cathedral which was demolished 
by lightning some time ago. The remaining 
parts are the choir, and the tower at the 
western end, the street passing across what 
was once the nave. So that the bits of build- 
ing which are left somewhat resemble the 
parts of a wasp which has had the misfortune 
to be cut in half ; an inconvenience which 
seems constantly occurring to that insect, and 
to which its peculiar physical conformation 
renders it particularly liable. The tower is 
321 feet high, and from its top may be seen a 
great part of Holland spread out like a map ; 
the high tower of Amersfoort, and the two 
spires of Hertogenbosch, better known by its 
French name of Bois le Due, being marked 
features in the panorama. At Utrecht the 

i 



114 



country begins to undulate a little, and here 
tlie canals are not on a level with the houses, 
but in hollows below. In the fish-market were 
dried red eels exposed largely for sale : a 
delicacy apparently of particular attraction to 
certain Vrouws, but which, regarded as a 
comestible, made my blood run cold. They 
were also objectionable on the same ground 
as is occasionally French butter, which is 
sometimes so insufferably rank as not to be 
approached within three yards to leeward 
with impunity. You indignantly summon 
the garcon. He shrugs his shoulders, and 
remarks with calm nonchalance "Ah oui, 
c'est un pen fort ! " Having in two or three 
hours well explored Utrecht, I proceeded by 
train to Arnheim. 

The railway cuts for several miles through 
tracts of sand which look like, and very 



115 



probably are, Dunes on one of their inland 
tours. About Arnlieim the country becomes, 
by comparison, quite mountainous, and here 
are the chief seats of the Dutch nobility. One 
of the smartest of them overlooks the railway 
terminus at Arnheim. It belongs to a baron 
with one of those hopelessly unpronounceable 
names, all consonants, which Southey describes 
iil the March to Moscow 

" After them came 

A terrible man with a terrible name, 

A name which we all know by sight very well, 

But which no one can speak and no one can spell." 

From motives of curiosity I requested an 
innkeeper to pronounce the baron's title to 
me, but can give no idea of the sound, except 
that it was something very unmellifluous, and 
a compromise between a hiccup and a growl. 

Arnheim is in some respects a pretty town, 
but dull as any place can be. It contains no 

i 2 



116 



remarkable buildings except two great churches, 
one of which is surmounted by a prodigiously 
high tower in the pure Dutch-pigeon-house 
style of architecture. A river runs by the 
town called the Ehine. Quantum mutatus ab 
illo ! But it is not the Rhine, though the 
water is undeniably Ehine water. Having 
explored the place, I made a large investment 
in Dutch story books, and established myself 
on a seat in the boulevards to read them. One 
was Roodcapje, or Little Eed Riding Hood, a 
very old friend in Dutch costume : which af- 
flicting narrative of wolfish perfidy held me 
entranced till the evening, when there was a 
train back to Utrecht. 

Set off very early next morning by diligence 
to Gkrada, sending on my bag by the same 
conveyance to Rotterdam, The road between 
Utrecht and Rotterdam is paved almost 



117 



throughout with clinkers. A great many parts 
of Holland are entirely destitute of stones of 
any kind, so that some such artificial materials 
for roads as clinkers are indispensable. We 
passed whole tribes of storks. These birds are 
much petted in Holland, and protected by laws 
as the Ibis was among the ancient Egyptians. 
In many places posts are put up in the fields, 
surmounted by cartwheels, for them to build 
their nests upon. The Dil rumbled along 
pleasantly enough at its usual sober pace of 
five miles or so an hour, and arrived about 
the middle of the day at G-ouda. The town 
might have passed for the mummy or fossil 
of a deceased city, so lifeless and petrified it 
seemed. The best cheeses, however, are made 
in the neighbourhood of Grouda. I quitted 
the sedate old vehicle here for the purpose of 
seeing the stained glass windows in the great 



118 



clmrcli. These were formerly considered the 
finest in the world, but they are certainly 
pretty considerably eclipsed by those at St. 
Maria Hilf at Munich, and many others, 
now-a-days. There proved to be no inn in 
the place, nor a valet de place, so that getting 
into the church at all appeared slightly pro- 
blematical. That feat, however, was eventually 
accomplished by the aid of a small Dutch coin, 
a little pantomime, and a friendly female. 
Having read of a curious volume descriptive 
of the windows, I endeavoured to get my fair 
cicerone to bring it, but she would persist in 
thinking that my ambition was that, common 
to most John Bulls, of writing my name in the 
visitors' book. My invaluable friend the dic- 
tionary having been inadvertently sent on to 
Rotterdam, I had no further means of eluci- 
dating my wishes than by looking despond- 



119 



ingly at the windows as if sighing for an 
interpretation of them. At last the light 
flashed upon her, and she produced " The Ex- 
planation of the famous and renowned Glas- 
work, or painted windows, in the fine and 
eminent church at Grouda, for the use and 
commodity of both inhabitant and foreigners 
who come to see this artificial work." A 
particularly diverting little volume, worthy of 
a place in Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, 
and containining grammatical and orthogra- 
phical devices of very considerable ingenuity. 

Not being able to find any means of con- 
veyance to Rotterdam, my only resource was 
to take the points of the compass from the 
church, and set off walking in a sou-westerly 
direction. I judged it prudent, however, on 
leaving the town, to inquire of a benign- 
looking baker whether the track was right or 



120 



not, and he told me in Dutch, which was 
fortunately intelligible, that the road was just 
the other way ! On retracing my steps. I 
perceived another church standing at nearly 
right angles to the one which had been my 
compass, so that if to point east and west be. 
as is generally supposed, the orthodox position 
of such edifices, Dutch churches, whatever 
Romish may be, are not always "infallible' 3 
as guides. The road which the benevolent 
baker had indicated terminated in a canal, 
which was not very encouraging. There being, 
however, a way both to the right and left, I 
took the former at a venture. After a short 
time it began to wax u Thin by degrees and 
beautifully less," and to lose all resemblance 
to a Dil road, so meeting an old fish Vrouw, I 
brought all my available stock of Dutch into 
action for information. She straightway burst 



121 



forth into an impassioned oration, perfectly 
unintelligible to me, but which, from the tone 
and emphasis, seemed to be something to the 
effect of " Lor' bless the man, what was he 
thinking of, that way to Rotterdam ! " &c. &c. 
We walked together for some little time, my 
ears being of course pricked up to catch any- 
thing that could be construed and turned to 
account, and from the little bits and scraps 
which were to be made out here and there, it 
seemed that the way lay over a certain draw- 
bridge, and then straight on. Having gone 
through my whole stock in trade of Dutch 
words expressive of thanks (not the most ex- 
tensive vocabulary, consisting of " Danke 
wokl," and a brace or so of interjections, with 
varieties of emphasis to mitigate the sameness 
of repetition,) I set off in pursuit of the bridge 
and road therefrom, and was not sorry to find 



122 



the same, having had at one time grim appre- 
hensions of being doomed to walk for the rest 
of my days round and round Gouda like the 
legendary Wandering Jew. The road ran for 
seven or eight miles along the top of a dam, 
and then descending, about the same distance 
through fens and willows. As it neared Bot- 
terclam it gradually assumed the character of 
a street of villas. Each villa here was, as 
elsewhere, surrounded with its moat spanned 
by a little drawbridge which is kept raised till 
required to be lowered for the admission of 
visitors ; thus forming a most effectual defence 
against tramps, that is if Dutch tramps are 
imbued with the same mortal antipathy to 
water as are their English compeers. 

I devoted the remaining daylight, after reach- 
ing Eotterdam, in exploring the shops, and 
made wholesale investments in gingerbread for 



exportation. This is a very extensive article of 
commerce in Holland. There it is usually made 
with honey, and is very unlike the doubtful 
compounds of earth, treacle, and sawdust, with 
which its good name is profaned elsewhere. 
Some of the varieties are highly spiced, so 
much so that any large consumer would be, on 
his decease, already embalmed. The Dutch 
confectioners, too, have a habit of writing in- 
scriptions in flour and water on their cakes of 
gingerbread, some of which are quite gems of 
sentiment not unworthy of the great Toole 
himself, showing how much of the poetical and 
intellectual may be imparted by genius even to 
the homeliest matters. Having a small matter 
to transact at an office in Rotterdam, I pre- 
sented myself there, accompanied, in case of 
need, by an interpreter. The Dutchmen who 
attended to my business found it quite beyond 



124 



their powers of comprehension to understand 
how the euphonious name of E — could by any 
possibility be only one syllable, or how indeed 
a word so spelt could ever be pronounced at all. 
One enterprising gentleman favoured me with 
his notion of it, which was a spasmodic sound, 
partaking equally of a whistle and a sneeze. 
They persisted at last in describing me as 
i 6 Mynheer Auy , ' ' which was rather an infelicitous 
essay, as this version did not happen to contain 
a single letter of the illustrious name which it 
professed to represent. 

Next morning, Saturday, I started at 7 a.m. 
for London by the " Rainbow," leaving Holland 
with much regret, as being a most interesting 
country, abundantly repaying the trouble of a 
visit, and, for myself, having experienced in a 
very short stay there a great deal of kindness 
and good nature. Oh board the Rainbow was 



125 



a German band who enlivened us by practising 
their stock of tunes in the forecabin. For- 
tunately the sea was pretty smooth, or the 
airs might have descended into the minor key. 
There was also a German confectioner bring- 
ing over with him a vast sarcophagus of deal 
with an imposing inscription on the lid admon- 
ishing an admiring public generally that inside 
was " The grand bouquet of eatable sugar- 
flowers for the great Exhibition." When the 
precious box, containing the result of probably 
many months' labour, was being landed, the 
poor confectioner kept dancing up and down 
the wharf in an agony of apprehension lest it 
should come to harm. Happily, however, it 
arrived safely at its destination in the Crystal 
Palace, as I took particular pains to ascertain. 
There were also several other Germans on 
board, one of whom after suffering from the 



126 



effects of the sea all day, languidly raised his 
head from his berth in the evening, and prof- 
fered a faint request to the stewardess to 
"make" him an egg, a demand which that 
unfeeling functionary was immoderately amused 
with. 

Unhappily for those who object to the motion 
of a vessel at sea, the insular position of Eng- 
land makes it difficult to return to it otherwise 
than by water, and therefore homebound travel- 
lers on landing at London Bridge are often 
more inclined to ask for " a little weak brandy 
and water " than to surrender themselves to 
poetical impulses and exclaim with Scott ''This 
is mine own, my native — fog." Twenty-four 
hours on board a crowded steamer makes one 
much too dirty to be poetical. TYhen we were 
about fifty miles from the mouth of the Thames, 
a violent squall came on. Our captain, a 



127 



dapper little man, with a delicate voice, prim 
attire, and elegant little feet cased in boots of 
jetty spotlessness, was scarcely now to be recog- 
nized buttoned up to the eyes in waterproof, 
and surmounted by a sou-wester hat, bawling 
orders to the sailors with a hoarse roar like a 
train in a tunnel, with occasional ejaculatory 
exhortations reminding one of gusts of wind in 
the chimney. The night was so extremely 
dark that in coming up the Thames we ran full 
tilt against a buoy, and damaged his head, 
poor little fellow ! and then, grating over a 
sandbank, demolished a beacon set thereupon, 
whereon our captain thought it best to anchor 
till daylight, which did not seem a very un- 
reasonable precaution. "We all allowed that it 
was the most judicious course to remain where 
we were, since the boat was in point of fact 
fast aground. A select party of us established 



128 



ourselves in a snug corner in the cabin, and 
desired the steward to " keep on bringing grog 
hot and strong till farther notice/' whereby the 
night passed pleasantly enough. Fortunately 
for us, the brandy was good. To some people, 
that particular spirit is not devoid of associa- 
tions on board a ship which are not so appeti- 
zing as those connected with it in relation to 
mince pies at Christmas. There did not 
happen to be a pack of cards on board, other- 
wise I should have been glad to learn the 
Dutch game of " ombre," which is a kind of 
whist, but more complicated. 

The account of my first trip to Holland 
ended, of course, at this point. The pages 
which follow contain a few notes of what 
amused and interested me most during a few 
days' visit to the Dutchmen in the early part 
of last July (1860). 



129 



First, as to the Great Ship Canal. The 
"tourist," as anyone who is travelling merely 
for his own pleasure is called in guide books, 
should make an excursion up this canal, for 
without actually seeing it it would be difficult 
to form a just conception of the impressive 
grandeur of the work. A screw steamboat 
goes up it daily, leaving Amsterdam at some 
unholy hour in the morning, and reaching 
the Helcler in the afternoon. However early 
the boat may start, it will be found worth 
while to be on the quay an hour beforehand, 
for there are so many amusing things of one 
kind or another to be seen at that spot. In 
the first place there are the Dutch yachts, of 
the shape of half an orange slightly com- 
pressed. These as they lie lolling lazily in 
slumberous inertness on the stagnant water, 
or else go torpidly sliding and oozing about, 

K 



130 



like gouty and plethoric old punts, among the 
mud and slime, form a graphic illustration 
of the serene composure which is alleged to 
characterize Dutch proceedings generally. They 
are simply miniature barges, even stubbier and 
heavier in proportion to their size than the 
bigger craft of the same description. A re- 
gatta must be the comicalest thing in the 
world. The way to enjoy one would be to see 
the start, or, rather, what in the case of so 
languid and inert a commencement of motion 
might more properly be termed the gradual 
process of departure, then go up to Friesland 
for a week, or grind at a Dutch grammar 
somewhere out of the way for a few days, and 
then return to witness the finish. In vivid 
contrast to these portly little vessels, which 
remind one of extremely chubby children, a 
few eight-oared racing boats may be observed 



131 



with crews of corpulent mynheers in them 
rowing with demoniacal energy in preparation 
for some forthcoming regatta, and blowing 
like asthmatic grampuses with their exer- 
tions ; cheered to their work by a dapper 
little eoxwain of something under thirteen 
stone ! A Cambridge boating man is not 
likely to gain any new lights from these pon- 
derous gentlemen in the stern as to the best 
method of handling the lines, but to listen to 
the encouragement which they administer 
staccato, as is the manner of coxwains, to 
their crews, will afford a good lesson in Dutch 
interjections, with the addition perhaps, if 
any misadventure should occur, of a choice 
bouquet of the flowers of Dutch expletive. 
The resources of the language in the latter 
capacity seem to be considerable. A year or 
two ago an unusual number of boats was 

k 2 



132 



entered for the great race, and hot excitement 
prevailed as to the result. "When the event, 
however, came off, some meddlesome English, 
taking a mean advantage of Dutch prejudices 
against rapid motion, appeared unexpectedly 
as competitors, and carried off the prize. It 
was an unfair and unprincipled act. Then on 
this same quay there are the tiny glass-fronted 
summer houses, looking like a row of Brough- 
ams with the wheels off, in which the mem- 
bers of the Yacht Club sit and contemplate 
the very deliberative performances of the 
yachts described above. In these snug little 
bins the cosiest of small teaparties are given. 
These entertainments enjoy the advantage of 
having a slight but pleasing touch of the 
nautical imparted to them by the occasion, 
while at the same time they are wholly free 
from the disturbing accessory of sea-sickness. 



133 



The festivities in question, if not quite so 
hilarious as those which take place at a par- 
ticular spot, known only to the initiated, 
between Gravesend and Blackwall, are at any 
rate held under less formidable discouragement 
than arises from the unpleasant combination 
of earwigs, mould, and beerslops, which form 
the prevailing features of al fresco entertain- 
ments at Cremorne. Then the fleet of boats 
which comes across in the early morning from 
the Broek district to supply Amsterdam with 
milk for its breakfast is worth seeing. For 
the sails are brilliantly white and clean, indi- 
cating that the indefatigable washerwomen of 
Broek must have been at them, and they seem 
moreover to have been cut on a principle 
which, judging from the result, aimed at 
making them nothing but corners. In the 
strawberry season, also, the sight and smell 



134 



of that most agreeable fruit, which conies in 
innumerable baskets from North Holland to 
form Amsterdam's dessert, is very gratifying. 
Near this same quay is a tower with no end of 
a name. It is called the Schreijershocketoren, 
or Weepers-corner-tower. I am not a person 
of a sufficiently bold temperament to make 
myself responsible for the exact orthography 
of so tremendous a word. I believe it was so 
christened because, being situated at the point 
whence vessels used mostly to set sail for 
foreign parts, the spot was a constant scene 
of lamentation on the part of those who took 
thence their last lingering look at the ships 
which bore away from them their relations or 
friends. Close, too, to the starting point of 
the steamer will be observed a large dam 
which affords a striking example of the com- 
plaint to which dams are liable, that, namely, 



135 



of subsiding down into the water. This par- 
ticular invalid is sinking without hope of re- 
covery, squeezing up on each side of it, as it 
descends, a quantity of sand, after the fashion of 
what may "be observed to occur when a plump 
person lies down on a soft featherbed. Lastly, 
the steamboat office displays a choice specimen 
of the Dutch vocabulary in it's superscription 
of " Scroefstoombootdienst," which, as it is 
hardly necessary to say, means " Screwsteam- 
boatservice." 

In making excursions in Holland away from 
the principal towns it will be found of the 
greatest possible advantage to take either a 
regular Dutch servant, or a commissionaire 
who knows the districts which you propose 
to visit. And this recommendation holds good 
whether you speak the language or not, and 
whether you think most of time, of comfort, 



136 



or of economy, or, like myself, have an eye to 
all these three considerations together. For 
the Dutch, except in the largest towns, are 
as yet not much accustomed to English tra- 
vellers. They do not get enough of the article 
to make it, as the Swiss and Belgians do, their 
staple subject of profit. Consequently Mr. 
"Tourist" doesn't find convenient grooves 
ready made for his wheels (metaphorically 
speaking) to run in, and his time is wasted, 
and attention absorbed, in ascertaining a mul- 
tiplicity of particulars relative to the pro- 
ceedings of the innumerable steamboats, treks- 
chuits, and diligences, which ply about the 
country. Now a Dutch servant, who has pro- 
bably been over the ground a hundred times 
before, makes such arrangements as enable 
you to avail yourself of the various convey- 
ances to the best advantage, or if he doesn't 



137 



happen to be already well up in these matters, 
he makes it his first business to become so. 
Then he knows, or finds out, what is worth 
seeing everywhere, and at hotels he takes care 
that all your wants are properly attended to. 
He calls you in the morning, and while you 
are shaving (or, if " you" happen to be a she, 
while you are performing one of those interest- 
ing but mystic ceremonies of the female toilet 
the nature of which still remains unrevealed 
to us desolate bachelors) well — while you are 
shaving, or doing your back hair as the case 
may be — he hunts up, and makes proper assign- 
ations with, the doorkeepers of churches, 
towers, and museums, whom you would other- 
wise have spent the whole morning, in great 
exhaustion of body and tribulation of mind, 
in ferreting out. He provides his own com- 
missariat himself, but his lodging, which 



138 



comes to about sixpence a night, is charged to 
you. You par hrm four gulden, or six and 
eightpence, a day, that is to say the precise 
identical sum which in this favoured land you 
would be charged by an attorney for his exer- 
tions in replying " Very well, I thank you " 
when you asked him how he did, or for doing 
you some equally gratifying and important 
service. (See solicitors' bills passim.) Six 
and eightpence, in the case of your Dutchman, 
will probably be saved to you by him several 
times in the course of your first morning in 
North Holland. To all this may be added 
that he has a knack of immediately slipping 
into the most friendly and confidential rela- 
tions with ail sorts and conditions of men who 
turn up on your route, and this becomes the 
source of amusement and advantage to you 
in a thousand ways. 



139 



I secured an attendant spirit of this descrip- 
tion at Amsterdam for the excursion to the 
Helder, and we agreed so exceedingly well 
that it was as much by my own desire as his 
that we continued our companionship clown to 
Rotterdam, and thence onwards through. Dort, 
Breda, and Bergen op Zoom, to Antwerp. The 
man's name was Jacob, pronounced in Dutch 
u Yaakobe." What his surname may have 
been I am not in a position to state, although 
he certainly had one, for he wrote it down for 
me with a pencil at full length. It appeared 
to be composed of a miscellaneous collection of 
consonants, but sparingly interspersed with 
vowels, dribbled over the paper, and forming 
such awkward conglomerates of letters as 
triumphantly to defy articulation by any but 
Dutch lips. It ended in a long tail of u-s and 
z-s in various phases of combination. We 



140 



talked at first in French, but my friend's 
English proved to be so exceedingly comic 
that it was much too good to lose, so we soon 
adhered to that language. It may be worth 
while to caution the unwary against the indis- 
cretion of telling a Dutchman that you speak 
French, because then if you do not understand 
his French, which is quite another thing alto- 
gether ! he either feels insulted, or else sets 
you down for an impostor. Yet a page of 
Dumas read with a good Dutch brogue is as 
wholly unlike any French that ever was heard 
at Paris, as the first line of the Iliad when 
recited by a modern Greek is to the same set 
of words as pronounced in English Schools. In 
Spanish hotels they shoot down on the table 
before you a mass of animal matter of some 
inscrutable description, dabbled over with 
grains of Indian corn, and inform you that it 



141 



is veal, or chicken, or pork, as the case may be. 
The particular identity however of the subject 
matter of the dish is rendered wholly indis- 
cernible by the overwhelming force of the 
general sense of dirt and onions which oblit- 
erates all traces of any less powerful impression 
on the palate. Xo less effectually does a down- 
right uncompromising double-Dutch pronun- 
ciation muffle the peculiar ring of French. 

Jacob's remarks on things in general, and 
the account of his various experiences during 
four or five years* residence in England, kept 
me in a chronic state of entertainment. Ob- 
serving to him that pillar post offices had 
been introduced at Amsterdam since my last 
visit there, I enquired how it was that letter- 
boxes were not made in the front doors of 
houses as in England. A proper appreciation 
of the convenience of that arrangement seems 



142 



not yet to have dawned upon Holland, since 
it turned out that Jacob in his unconsciousness 
of the existence of any such plan had inno- 
cently imagined the letter slits in the front 
doors of private houses in London to be all 
public post-offices. He supposed, in fact, that 
in England it is a case of " every man his 
own postmaster." He related to me how he 
became disabused of this erroneous estimate 
which he had formed of the postal facilities 
enjoyed by Londoners, in the following terms. 
" I vas in Fenchurch Street, Sare. I ave a 
lettaire to Arnheini. I zee 'lettaire borx' 
written up over a hole in a shcntleman's door, 
and I dro im in. A shentleman comsh by, 
and he zee me dro im in, and he zays to me 
in Sherman, 6 Are you a foreigner? dat is not 
de post.' Zo I ringsh de bell, and I zay to im, 



143 



6 1 zouglit dat you was cle post ; wid you hab 
de gootness to gib me my lettaire ?' " 

Jacob puzzled me for several days by talk- 
ing constantly of his "maid." It seemed very 
odd altogether, because in tlie first place I 
didn't see what legitimate business lie could 
possibly have with such an article as that in 
any shape or capacity. And clearly he did not 
refer to his wife, because if there were such a 
person as Mrs. Jacob she had in the nature of 
things a right to the more dignified title of 
matron ; moreover the relations which prevailed 
between my companion and the fair unknown 
were evidently those of the softest and most 
unclouded harmony. This latter circumstance 
seemed of course to repel the theory that the 
connection between them was one of a matri- 
monial nature. The maid in question appeared, 



144 



too, from Jacob's description to be a person of 
uncontrollably excursive impulses, since she 
was represented as constantly bouncing about, 
like a cracker in a grate, from one corner of 
Holland to the other. Had it not been for 
these strongly-marked traits of character, the 
description of which seemed to point to 
the existence of a real personality, I should 
have concluded that the lady was a Harris, 
invented, as in the case of the ingenious 
Mrs. Gamp, for the purpose of setting forth, 
as by the mouth of an impartial observer, the 
manifold excellencies of my friend Jacob with 
greater gracefulness and decorum. The very 
strong perception of Jacob's virtue and integ- 
rity with which the maid in question seemed 
to be gifted, and the glowing language in 
which, as he professed to quote it to me, she 
was in the habit of launching forth in praise 



145 



of these qualities, seemed to give a strong 
colouring of probability to the Harris theory. 
A solution of the enigma, together with a visible 
revelation of the mysterious being herself, was 
at last by chance vouchsafed to me. For while 
the Nieuwe Diep steamer by which we were 
going up North Holland was stopping in the 
Purmerende lock, Jacob suddenly fizzed up into 
a paroxysm of hot excitement and exclaimed 
" Dere go my maid, Sare! Dere she go! Dere 
she go! D-e-r-e she go!" and then, with the 
view no doubt of attracting the lady's attention, 
he proceeded to execute such a series of panto- 
mimic gesticulations as must have exhausted, I 
should imagine, nearly the whole code of sig- 
nals known to telegraphy. I looked up with 
lively interest, and saw a dusty and dilapidated 
hackney coach, drawn by two wheezy and despair- 
ing old screws, and containing in its inside four 

L 



146 



long beards, four long pipes, and, as far as could 
be seen, four full developments of waistcoat indi- 
cative of portly stomachs within them. Most 
remarkable female, this ! I thought ; but then 
at last it suddenly flashed across my very dull 
and slow comprehension that the "maid" was 
Jacob's " mate" who was in partnership with 
him in the business of piloting strangers about 
Holland. My companion's indiscriminate use 
of " he" and "she" had hitherto Iblindecl me to 
this apparently obvious interpretation of the 
mystery. In the Jacobean vocabulary, indeed, 
most objects, animate and inanimate, singular and 
plural, had something of a tender and endear- 
ing interest shed around them by being referred 
to by that pleasantest and softest of pronouns 
u she." For example, he related to me an 
anecdote connected with a certain balloon in the 
following terms. " Ven I vas in London, Sare, 



147 



a balloon comsh raite down on de top ob our 
house near de Blackfriar Brig. She let out dree 
shentlemans, and den she go upstairs again." It 
seems that the courage of the three gentlemen 
evaporated before they got far, so the balloon 
had to come down and deposit them, and then 
" go upstairs again." 

The screw steamers which ply on the Grand 
canal are in shape the reverse of the ordinary 
type of Dutch craft, since they are so narrow 
as to remind one of a certain racing boat, 
which, according to the very old Joe Miller, 
was so crank that the crew had to be particular 
in parting their hah' down the middle with 
mathematical accuracy to avoid upsetting. So 
unusual a departure from the most fondly che- 
rished national prejudices of the Dutch is 
accounted for by the existence of a similar 
necessity to that which would compel a lady 

l 2 



148 



who wished to take a country walk through 
narrow turnstiles to divest herself of her cri- 
noline before starting. For this exceptional 
shape is imposed upon the steamers in question 
by the narrowness of certain locks through 
which they have to pass. Each pair of locks 
is double, one being intended for large ships, 
and the other for barges and such like. The 
lock dues are very high, and it is a point of 
necessary economy, as well as a saving of time 
and trouble, to use the smaller ones. These 
steamers, therefore, are constructed of the ex- 
treme dimensions which the smaller locks will 
admit, and which they fit with the accuracy of a 
tight plug. The locks cause a world of trouble, ex- 
pense, inconvenience, and loss of time. In the 
first place, the larger ones are constantly getting 
damaged by ships, which in tempestuous 
weather are apt to become restive and intract- 



149 



able, butting their noses against the gates 
at the further end with a terrific bang like 
that with which Tom Sayers' fist alighted on 
Heenan's " smeller." That last simile, by 
the way, is not of unexceptionable accuracy, 
since the direction of impact is different in 
the two cases. For in the case of the ships 
and the lock it is the nose which is the striker 
and not the recipient of the blow. Secondly, 
the locks are too short to admit a large pro- 
portion of the long American clippers which 
are all the fashion nowadays. These, there- 
fore, can only use the canal on the rare 
occasions when the water in it happens to be 
on a level with that of the Y, so that the 
gates at both ends of the locks may be open 
at the same time. 

The run up the great North Holland canal is 
the most amusing and pleasant thing in the 



150 



world if you happen to get what Jacob called 
a " handsome " day for the purpose. This was 
a piece of good fortune which was unusually 
exhilarating last Spring, since the weather 
up to that time had been so wet and cold, 
and generally objectionable, as to make one's 
spirits as damp and mouldy as one's coat. 
Without making the endless fuss about weather 
which some people do, it must be admitted 
that those atmospheric conditions are disad- 
vantageous to the full enjoyment of scenery 
which are such as to compel you to scuffle 
about in India rubber goloshes with a respi- 
rator on, and with a bottle of cough mixture 
or Ipecachuana lozenges in your pocket. But 
under a tolerably amiable sky there is probably 
no other space of fifty miles in any part of the 
world which presents so many objects to 
interest and amuse as will be seen in travers- 



151 



ing the narrow wedge of land which forms 
the Western frame of the Zuider Zee, and 
which is known as u North Holland." Here 
it is that the " human beavers," as the Dutch 
have been appropriately called, may be seen 
under their most singular conditions of exist- 
ence. Here it is that their primitive customs, 
dress, and habits, are displayed in their most 
vivid picturesqueness. The expanse too, ap- 
parently illimitable, of brilliant emerald-green 
watermeadow, dotted over with numberless 
flocks and herds, is pleasant to look upon, 
presenting as it does a scene of pastoral rich- 
ness to which that of even the Vale of Ayles- 
bury is, by comparison, but an Irish bog. 
Then the farmhouses look so comfortable with 
their tall pyramidal thatched roofs. It is 
within these roofs that hay for the provender 
of the cattle during the winter is stored. The 



152 



cattle themselves lodge at the back of the 
premises, while the farmer and his family 
occupy the front. Bipeds and quadrupeds 
thus mutually keep one another warm below, 
while the superincumbent haystack is a suffi- 
ciently stout protection against cold from 
above. And it would be hard to say whether 
the boudoir of the worthy Gevrouw, the mis- 
tress of the establishment^ or the cowhouse 
behind it, is the more luminously clean. The 
dairy stands by itself at a few yards' distance. 
The outline of these farmhouses, with the low 
oblong structure below, and their great wedge- 
like roofs above, reminded me, to compare 
great things with small, of those contraptions 
compounded of portmanteau and carpet-bag 
which one sees at trunk shops. 

The Ship Canal is the most frequented high- 
way of Holland, so that there is always plenty 



153 



of traffic on its waters. Besides which, there 
is a capital carriage road along one of its 
banks, so that from the deck of the steamer 
you see all that is stirring in the country. 
Among the ships which you meet, there will 
probably be some bringing wheat from Russia, 
and others laden with timber from the same 
country, or from Norway. For Holland is the 
dairy of Europe, and grows but little corn or 
wood. It is very possible also that you will 
pass a large screw steamer laden with cattle 
for the London market, and presenting a very 
imposing appearance. Be on your guard, how- 
ever, against being too easily tempted by the busi- 
ness-like trim and go of the ship to adventure a 
voyage in her when you leave Holland, unless 
you have plenty of time to spare. For first of 
all, the whole length of the great canal has 
to be traversed at half speed, in obedience to 



154 



a very necessary police regulation for ships of 
large size, and when at length yon emerge into 
the open sea, the mouth of the Zuider Zee 
and its vicinity is so beset with shoals that 
you are likely enough to pass one night hard 
aground off the Texel, a second jammed on to 
a bank near Friesland, and so on, the tempe- 
rature of your body all this time varying 
inversely with that of your temper. For it 
always blows stiff at the entrance of the Zuider 
Zee. In addition to which, if you should 
happen to be of an excitable temperament in- 
sufficiently bridled by strict principle, there 
is but too grave a risk that you may be 
betrayed into giving expression to sentiments, 
not exactly pious orisons, with reference to 
the ship, and the mud, and the Zuider Zee, 
and things in general, such as you cannot 
fail, in your calmer moments, to deplore. 



155 



On the road which runs, as has been men- 
tioned, along one bank of the canal, yon will 
occasionally see a North Holland gig, such 
an institution as, if it were to appear in Long 
Acre, would make the hair of the whole of 
the coachbuilding interest which is there con- 
centrated stand on end with amazement. One 
would have thought that nothing so extrava- 
gantly comic could have been met with out 
of a Pantomime. They are something like 
ancient triumphal cars. The animals in the 
shafts, however, if they are all in the same 
style as those which came under my observa- 
tion, are anything but triumphal. They are as 
thin as gnats in that portion of their persons 
which, in the language of the stable, is ex- 
pressively termed the barrel, and their coats 
and tails are composed of wisps of such ragged 
and rusty hair as would astonish even a Tip- 



156 



perary barber. And they go shambling and 
staggering along the road in so precarious a 
fashion that one feels it to be far more satis- 
factory to contemplate their performances from 
a distance than to be brought into any more 
immediate connexion with their proceedings. 
They certainly can't be pronounced to be what 
" ossy 99 men call " spanking tits." To confess the 
truth, my notions are still very nebulous and 
unsettled as to what the process of " spanking " 
may be, and as to what particular description 
of animal comes under the description of a 
" tit," but the tone of enthusiastic eulogy in 
which the words are usually pronounced leads 
one to infer thkt a tit is the correct article, 
and that spanking is " the thing to do." 
Occasionally three gigs may be seen following 
one another in procession, and that means a 
good deaL Namely this. The first gig con- 



157 



tains an intending bride and bridegroom on 
their way to the nearest town to sign a public 
notice of their contemplated marriage. The 
gentleman of course looks as brisk and proud 
as a young bantam cock, and has inserted 
himself into a new waistcoat and inconceivables 
of boisterous patterns in honour of the occasion. 
The lady is also got up to her highest acme, and 
blushes interestingly. The four witnesses who 
have to attest the document follow in the 
two gigs in their wake. The notice, when 
executed with all the necessary formalities, 
is placed, as is also the custom in many other 
countries, in a kind of meat-safe at the door 
of the Town Hall, and a fortnight afterwards, 
if no valid objection is made in any quarter, 
the pair may become man and wife. The 
civil marriage takes place first at the Town 
Hall, and the job is finally completed at the 



158 

Church. Probably the pair when they go to 
sign their names don't think about much else 
but "rapture, love, and bliss," and all that 
sort of thing, but it would inevitably, one 
would think, make people in any ordinary 
frame of mind rather unwell to travel by 
a conveyance which waggled up and down 
so energetically as these astonishing gigs do. 
They decidedly cannot be said to " go very 
comfortable," as dramatic critics say of a piece 
which meets with decent approval on the stage. 
It may be mentioned that in Holland court- 
ship and marriage are environed by such a 
multitude of social and legal ceremonies which 
have to be rigorously observed that the plum 
for which the bridegroom's mouth waters 
ought to prove a very sweet and luscious one 
indeed when he gets it, to compensate for 
such a world of trouble in the gathering. 



159 



Everyone knows the favourite old French 
proverb of " L'homme propose et Dieu dis- 
pose." The truth of the latter branch of 
the proposition is of course indisputable 
enough, but plain Dutch young ladies, if 
there are any such, must probably find more 
serious reason than is the case in other 
countries to complain that man is too often 
apt, in defiance of the proverb, to hang fire 
about proposing. 

Other victims, but in this latter case un- 
willing ones, may be seen travelling to their 
doom along this same main turnpike road 
of North Holland, namely, flocks of sheep on 
their way to Islington Cattle Market. Such, 
at least, is their eventual destination, but 
they have to go to Amsterdam in the first 
instance to be shipped. These unlucky sheep 
are truly a sad sight to any one who knows 



160 



the cruelty to which they are about to be 
subjected. For they have nothing given them 
to eat or drink during the voyage, which, as 
has been mentioned, is occasionally protracted 
to several days. Anyone who will remark the 
appearance of Dutch flocks in their native 
pastures, and then take the trouble to go 
and see what the same sheep are like when 
landed in London from the Amsterdam and 
Harlingen steamers, will heartily wish there 
were some means of bringing about an 
alteration in these arrangements. An after- 
noon at a Paris abattoir, or a visit to a 
properly conducted London slaughter-house, 
leaves an impression which is the reverse of 
mournful. For it will have been seen that in 
the majority of cases so very much less pain 
is inflicted on the animals than could possibly 
have been supposed. But it has a very different 



161 



effect upon one's spirits to inspect the cattle 
lairs, of which several still exist in the vicinity 
of Smithfielcl market, to which most of the 
starved and panting sheep and oxen which 
are imported from Holland are driven, if they 
happen to be landed on a Sunday. It occurs 
to me to remark, with reference to such 
ungenial subjects as abattoirs and the like, 
that there are perhaps few more perverse and 
wrongheaded people to be met with than 
those who profess to look with disgust upon 
the notion of anyone's visiting such spots as 
Montmartre, or the purlieus of the docks, 
or a thousand other unattractive places of 
various kinds which might be mentioned. 
Of course such scenes are not for women, but 
any man who has the slightest desire that 
good should prevail in the world can most 
effectually contribute his mite of aid towards 

M 



162 



helping forwards that result by making it his 
business to learn in the first place what does 
really go on about him. Publicity is the grand 
check to evil nowadays, and there is nobody 
who may not do something, however small, 
to help the better half of the world to know 
what its worse half is doing. But if our eyes 
are to be kept shut against everything except 
what is elegant and pleasing, all sorts of 
horrors may be committed upon all sorts of 
animals, biped and quadruped, and continue 
to be so, to the great convenience and satisfac- 
tion, of course, of the perpetrators, till doomsday. 

The great canal is distinguished by one 
particular form of animal life, namely, a 
most beautiful species of tern, with a beak 
of as brilliant a vermillion as Hyde's superfine 
sealing wax, or ripe capsicums. The delicate 
white and grey plumage of these birds is as 



163 



luminously clean as one would naturally an- 
ticipate from the circumstance that their lives 
are occupied by an unintermittent series of 
cold plunging baths in pursuit of small fish. 
These latter, when caught, find themselves 
put in possession of facilities such as are not 
enjoyed by the general public for ascertaining 
whether the in-ternal arrangements of their 
captors are as admirable as their ex-ternal 
graces. Wild ducks' eggs are collected in 
large numbers by the North Holland house- 
wives, and laid up for winter consumption. 

About two hours' steaming takes you from 
Amsterdam to Purmerende. At this latter 
place there is a lock, the only one intervening 
between the two terminal ones of the canal. 
The steamboat is so long in getting through 
this lock as to allow its passengers time for 
a walk through the adjoining town. Pur- 

M 2 



164 



nierende on a Tuesday, which is market day 
there, presents one of the most picturesque 
sights which can possibly be seen. In the 
first place there are the cheeses — acres of 
cheeses — neatly arranged in squares, and kept 
carefully covered up, except during inspection 
by people evincing a tendency to become 
purchasers. These cheeses are of a light 
transparent yellow, like ripe vegetable mar- 
rows. The coarse red coating which distin- 
guishes them when seen in grocers' shops in 
this country is put on subsequently to suit 
the taste of the English consumer. This seems 
to be adopting a corresponding principle of 
adornment to that pursued by ladies who daub 
themselves up with rouge to tickle the taste 
of the male consumer in the Hymeneal market 
Such a variety of quaint female costumes are 
collected together at the Purmerende market 



165 



that the scene has almost the appearance of a 
preternaturally staid and sober masquerade. A 
sprinkling will also be found there of old- 
fashioned elderly farmers in coats, waistcoats, 
and kneebreeckes, of black velvet, which was 
formerly the universal attire of men of their 
class in Holland. In the gradual obliteration 
of local peculiarities of every kind which in- 
creased facilities of communication are bringing 
about all over the world, the black velvet and 
kneebreeches, like the white smock frocks 
and top boots which a few years back were 
the Sunday-best of Sussex farmers, are giving 
way to plain, unpicturesque, cloth, and common- 
place inexpressibles. The words in Ecclesiasticus 
of " Rich men, furnished with ability, living 
peaceably in their habitations " seem to apply to 
these North Holland farmers with more exact pre- 
cision than to any other people in the world. 



166 



Purmerende, as its name implies (end 
having the same meaning in Dutch as it has 
in English) , stands at the end of the great 
Purmer polder. This polder lies twenty-four 
feet below the level of the ship-canal which 
crosses it. The soil in the polder will be 
observed to be drier and more fertile than 
that of the higher grounds. This is attri- 
butable, of course, to the judicious doctoring 
which it has received in the way of draining 
by dykes and pumping, and to the constant 
attention which it is found necessary to 
bestow upon it. The case is much the same 
with human subjects as with polders, for we 
often find that people who have received from 
nature but indifferent constitutions neverthe- 
less get on better, and present a more thriving 
appearance, in consequence of the difficult 
job they have "to make a live of it" at all, 



167 



as we Sussex clods say, than people of more 
rampant animal powers. 

An hour or so by steamboat brings you 
from Purmerende to Alkmaar, the capital of 
North Holland, and the greatest cheese mart 
in the world. The market day is Friday. 
Alkmaar fair, which takes place in October, 
is one of the strangest, as well as one of the 
most amusing, sights which can be seen any- 
where. A ball at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum 
is but a tame and humdrum affair in comparison 
with it. For under ordinary circumstances 
the North Hollanders are the most sober- 
sided, steady, and straightlacecl people that 
exist, primitive in their habits, and quaint 
to the last degree in their costumes and ways. 
Their households are regulated on the strictest 
principles of Puritanical austerity, while their 
own personal conduct and demeanour are such 



168 



as would be found perhaps somewhat oppres- 
sively virtuous by people who have failed to 
attain equally sublime heights of moral alti- 
tude. During fifty-one weeks of the year 
they live as quiet as Quakers. Masters and 
mistresses will not permit their servants to 
have any larks even of the mildest and most 
innocent description. " Sundays out " are 
unknown, and a follower who had the temerity 
to think of pursuing his vocation during any 
of these fifty-one weeks would receive such 
a grim warning from the authorities that he 
would retire in abject discomfiture, and follow 
no more for ever. The language of house- 
holders to their Johns and Bettys, as reported 
by Jacob, is of this kind. " Don't sbend your 
monee. Poot him away tillsh you are old." 
Most servants, therefore, have got a little sum 
either at the Savings' Bank, or in that uni- 



169 



versal private Bank of Deposit, an old stocking. 
But at fair-time all this intensely good behav- 
iour vanishes. The whole district goes wilfully 
and deliberately mad. Steady old gentlemen 
in velvet suits and knee breeches may be seen 
dancing in booths, striking the spectator with 
nearly as profound amazement as if he were 
to meet the Bishop of Oxford at a treat for 
the fancy at the Pencutters' Arms. The 
pockets of the old gentlemen in question are 
relieved of their contents in no time, and 
their Missuses are precluded from complaining 
by having embarked on a corresponding series 
of escapades on their own account. The men- 
servants, of course, and slavies, improve, if 
possible, upon the example which is set them 
by their betters. The old stockings have to 
disgorge their treasures, and the savings of 
a year disappear in a few minutes with that 



170 



astonishing rapidity which money that is being 
spent seems alone capable of attaining. The 
justification for these orgies of fan and dissipa- 
tion is the same as that which certain tiresome 
young imps in London pnt forward, in com- 
bination with an exceedingly dirty little hand 
and an oyster shell, that " it's only once a 
year." The annual festival, by the way, in 
which these young urchins desire that you 
should share, seems to occur about once a 
fortnight. Amsterdam fair begins early in 
September, and lasts three weeks. 

Shortly after leaving Alkmaar, as you con- 
tinue to proceed northwards by the ship-canal, 
dunes begin to appear on the left, indicating 
that the sea coast is probably not far off. These 
dunes give a great deal of trouble to the peo- 
ple who live just under them on the land side. 
For they are incessantly edging their way in- 



171 



wards from the coast. The advancing sand 
has therefore continually to be carted away, or 
it would smother the villages and fields in its 
onward march, like an avalanche. This north- 
west corner of North Holland has been found 
one of the most difficult points of the coast 
of the whole country to preserve from the 
encroachments of the sea. It has been found 
necessary to erect a triple fortification, consist- 
ing of three lines of the strongest kind of 
dam, composed of clay, big stones, and oak 
boards. These three great dams have been 
christened by the whimsical names of u The 
Sleeper," " The Waker," and " The Dreamer," 
respectively. 

During the last hour or so of the passage 
towards the Helder the scenery is very dull and 
monotonous. The farms are few and small ; 
windmills no longer give their suggestive touch 



172 



of human life and industry to the scene, and 
the canal itself is often inclosed within high 
banks. I took the opportunity, therefore, of 
finishing off the last pages of a novel by 
Dumas called " Amaury." Though cleverly 
written, as everything which conies from the 
pen of Alexander the Great must be, it is less 
amusing than most of his works. Yet it is 
worth reading, as affording a curious example 
of the diseased sentimentalism with which 
French minds are so largely tainted. The 
plot of the story, so far as it is necessary to 
relate it for criticism in this view, is as follows. 
The hero, Amaury, is passionately attached to 
a young lady who dies in a decline just before 
the time which had been fixed for his marriage 
with her. He therefore makes a very deli- 
berate attempt to commit suicide, and on 
being restrained from accomplishing his pur- 



173 



pose, nurses his grief to the utmost of his 
ability, and is only cheered up, after the lapse 
of some years, by the occurrence of certain 
circumstances of the most agreeable description 
possible, but not necessary to be detailed here, 
which work a restorative effect upon his spirits 
in spite of his most obstinate endeavours to the 
contrary. The father of the young lady, who is 
also overwhelmed with grief, takes an even still 
more reprehensible course. He commits a sort 
of moral self-destruction by retiring to a house 
immediately overlooking the grave of his de- 
ceased child, and there gradually, but as fast as 
he can contrive to achieve his object, frets himself 
to death. These proceedings on the part of the 
two principal male characters of the dramatis 
personae are marked by no single word of repre- 
hension on the part of the novelist, and are thus 
impliedly held up to admiration. The author's 



174 



views, too, on such points as these are fully ap- 
parent in some of his other works. Nor can this 
be said to be merely French morality a la Dumas, 
for everyone who has the slightest acquaintance 
with the light literature of Paris knows the con- 
trary. Besides which it will be observed that the 
reader's approbation is taken for granted, as if no 
question could possibly exist of its being fully and 
unhesitatingly accorded. Traces of the same kind 
of morbid sentiment, although not carried to so 
extravagant a length, may be discerned in the 
pale and pensive heroes whom Bulwer is so fond 
of depicting. Far be it from me to preach, but 
without incurring any such imputation as that, 
it may be permitted me at least to say that I 
have always been " given to understand " that 
one of the greatest blessings which Christianity 
confers upon mankind, and one of the most 
prominent characteristics which distinguish it 



175 



from heathen systems, is that it never fails to 
enable people to get their heads above water 
again after submersion by the very deepest and 
darkest waves of sorrow or misfortune , and that 
it absolutely prohibits them, in mercy to them- 
selves and for the good of all, from utterly and 
for ever surrendering themselves to grief. It 
is not of course to be by any means expected or 
desired that everyone should possess the in- 
domitable elasticity of spirits displayed by Mrs. 
Quicklackit of the Bath Guide— 

" But who is that bombazine lady so gay? 
So profuse of her beauties in sable array ? 
How she rests on her heel, how she turns out her toe, 
How she pulls down her stays with her head up, to show 
Her lily-white bosom that rivals the snow ! 
'Tis the Widow Quicklackit, whose husband last week, 
Poor Stephen, went suddenly forth in a pique, 
And pushed off his boat for the Stygian creek. 
Poor Stephen, he never returned from the bourn, 
But left the disconsolate widow to mourn. 
Three times did she faint when she heard of the news, 
Six days did she weep and all comfort refuse, 
But Stephen no sorrow, no tears, can recall, 
So she hallows the seventh, and comes to the ball." 



176 

I am debarred from all hope of emulating 
the fortitude of Mrs. QuicklacMt, since Pro- 
vidence has been good enough to exempt me 
from the possibility of ever experiencing the 
disadvantages of widowhood. Should, however, 
Jemima precede me to that bourn to which all 
Jemimas are eventually bound, I should hope 
to be able after a time to remember that it is 
simply perverse and wrong to render oneself 
incapable of playing one's proper part in life 
by indulging in enervating excesses whether 
moral or physical, no matter how plausible 
an excuse may exist for so doing, or how 
insidious the temptation to nurse a grief may 
be. If, therefore, my male friend, your 
Arabella should provokingly go and marry 
somebody else just when you fondly hoped 
that your suit was coming (in medical language) 
to a satisfactory head, do not, in an impulse of 



wild despair, hurry off to the Serpentine and 
qualify yourself for becoming the theme of a 
paragraph in the newspapers headed " Dis- 
tressing Suicide by a young gentleman." Think 
what a pang it would give your friends to 
hear those hoarse rascals who sell papers about 
the streets recommending The Evening Blazer 
for sale on the ground of its containing a full 
account of the melancholy occurrence, describing 
the fishing up of the body of the unfortunate 
deceased, and how a full confession was dis- 
covered in the toe of his right boot, together 
with a chilblain. Take, rather, a little Suss-::, 
air, or. in the last resort, a " Frampton's piU i 
health." which invaluable remedy is warranted, 
if the advertisements are to be believed, to set 
straight everything that can possibly get crooked 
in the human subject, from a heartburn to a 
heartache. 

N 



178 

There is a very old story about a party of 
thieves who were on some occasion or other 
jollificationizing in a festive manner at some 
favourite haunt of the members of their pro- 
fession, when a policeman appeared at the door 
and intimated to one of the party, who happened 
to be just in the middle of relating an anecdote, 
that he was " wanted." Being "wanted," in 
the sense in which the constabulary employ the 
term, frequently results, as proved to be the 
case in this instance, in transportation. Re- 
turning to London on the expiration of his 
period of banishment some years afterwards, 
the thief immediately sought his former resort, 
and finding his same old friends assembled there 
as before, took his place among them as if 
nothing had happened, simply resuming the 
thread of his story which had received so un- 
fortunate an interruption with the words "Well, 



179 



as I was saying." The digressions for which 
my pen has a constitutional infirmity render the 
prospects of my ever getting to an end of what 
I have to say about Holland as precarious as 
those which attend the arrangements of gentle- 
men who are frequently "wanted" as above. 

Nieuwe Diep, which is at the terminus of the 
Great Ship Canal, and at the extreme northern 
point of North Holland, is the Dutch Ports- 
mouth, and the chief naval arsenal of the country. 
There are smaller establishments of the same 
description at Flushing and Helvoetsluys. 
The dockyard at Rotterdam has lately been 
abolished. No ships are built at Nieuwe Diep. 
The yards for this purpose are at Amsterdam, 
and the hulls, when completed, are brought to 
Nieuwe Diep to be rigged and fitted out. If the 
vessels are too long to pass through the locks of 
the Grand Canal, they must come, of course, by 

N 2 



180 



the Zuider Zee. The Great Ship Canal, as con- 
necting Amsterdam with Nieuwe Diep, will still 
continue to be of considerable importance even 
when the new channel to the sea which is about 
to be made westwards via Zaanclpoort and 
Beverwyk has rendered the Dutch metropolis 
accessible to ships from the German Ocean by a 
cross country cut of only fifteen miles. The 
storehouses at Xieuwe Diep are very extensive, 
and the fortifications built to protect tkeni, and 
at the same time to command the entrance to 
the Zuider Zee, are formidable enough. Jacob 
took lively interest in the guard ship, the 
" Jupiter/' for it appeared that at some previous 
period of his history he had worked in the 
Amsterdam dockyards, and had been employed 
on this very vessel. He said to me "Dis, Sare, 
is de Zeupetair. I vork at im ven e vas leetle. 
Dat is de figoor ob Zeupetair at ees nose." The 



181 



words "I vork at im ven e vas leetle" were cal- 
culated to convey the notion that the Jupiter in 
its days of early babyhood had been but a little 
boat, and that it had gradually grown into a 
threedecker. It tickled my fancy exceedingly 
to think how appropriately Orbilius might have 
used the same expressions of himself with re- 
ference to Horace "I vork at im ven e vas 
leetle!" "De figoor of Zeupetair at ees nose" 
was in fact a figure-head, presenting in effigy 
some Dutch admiral of the old school, in a 
slouch hat and feather, and jack boots, with a 
cutlass in his hand, and that bull dog expression 
of countenance for which we may give such 
gallant men as Tan Tromp, De Euyter, and Tan 
Speyk, the most unhesitating credit. So that 
Mr, Jacob's views of the heathen mythology 
were not a little nebulous and indistinct, inas- 
much as he obviously fostered the conviction 



182 



that Jupiter was some famous Dutch, sea cap- 
tain. It may be mentioned that the Dutch navy 
consists at this moment of about 120 ships of 
various rates. 

The town of Nieuwe Diep is humble enough, 
and, apart from the naval establishment and 
military works, contains no object of the 
smallest interest whatever. With the excep- 
tion of the trees which are planted along the 
quays, there is probably no vegetable pro- 
duction so big as a rosebush within twenty 
miles of the place. But it is not without its 
attractions. There is fresh air enough in all 
conscience, for the entrance of the Zuider Zee 
is probably the windiest spot in the world. 
Furthermore, the houses are perhaps even more 
luminously clean and tidy than is usual in 
Holland. And the fishermen who lounge 
about the place at such moments as they are 



183 



not pursuing their avocation in the troubled 
waters of the Zuider Zee are such rough and 
harclv fellows that they would probably look 
upon our Yarmouth and Hastings boatmen with 
the same sort of mixture of pity and contempt 
with which a rough terrier would regard a lapdog, 
or such as one would imagine Garibaldi or a 
captain of Zouaves feeling for certain exceed- 
ingly silly and ridiculous English officers, 
redolent of pomatum and cosmetics, and talk- 
ing and thinking with that peculiar exhibition 
of feebleness and inanity, which, goodness knows 
why, they consider fine. Brave men, no doubt, 
like all other Englishmen, but why should 
they pretend to be idiotic ? 

A Dutch village, even when it is such an 
Ultima Thule as Nieuwe Diep, is never gloomy or 
forlorn. The general well-to-do and prosperous 
appearance of the inhabitants, and the extreme 



184 



neatness and brilliant paint of the houses, 
which look as if they had just come out of a 
toy box from the Lowther Arcade, preclude any 
other impression but that of cheerfulness, com- 
fort, and respectability. Fogs are said to prevail 
in Holland at times, but on the three occasions 
on which I have visited the country the atmo- 
sphere has generally been as full of light and 
brilliancy as though it had been manufactm'ed to 
order by Cuyp. Opposite Meuwe Diep, on the op- 
posite side of the entrance to the Zuider Zee, lies 
the island of the Texel. It is not worth seeing. 
Its metropolis is but an insignificant and 
common-place little village inhabited by the 
people who manage some extensive oysterbeds 
in the vicinity. The island is too sandy to 
yield pasture for cows, so that, as Jacob said, 
there are " nothing but sheeps and oysters there, 
no catties." 



185 



A walk of a couple of miles or so from 
Nieuwe Diep along the top of a sea clam which 
is quite a magnificent engineering work, 
brings you to the Helder lighthouse standing 
in the middle of a fort called Kijkduin. The 
view of illimitable sea and sand which you get 
from the top of this lighthouse is curious 
enough. The Helder, which means Hell's Door 
(in Dutch Hels-deur) has not much in common, 
in point of the character of the scene about it, 
with its French antitype in name the Barriere 
de L'Enfer. 

There was a fair going on, or at least the 
last expiring embers of one were still smould- 
ering, at the time of my visit to Meuwe Diep. 
Two portable theatres, with companies to 
match, had been brought from Amsterdam 
for the occasion. At one of these was played 
a drama of palpitating interest, the plot of 



186 



which was founded on the difficulties occurring 
between a gentleman and his wife arising from 
the unhappy gambling propensities of the 
latter. # Some friend of the gentleman's, a 
person, as it would seem, of much more zeal 
than discretion, endeavours to bring matters 
square by winning enough money at the gam- 
bling table to fill the lamentable void which 
had occurred in his friend's exchequer through 
the wife's losses at play. But he too, as was 
naturally to be expected, only gets bankrupt 
for his pains. "Whether it all comes right in 
the end, and the husband and wife were 
reconciled and "lived happily to the end of 
their lives " (as the good prince and princess 
of the old fairy tales who were married at 
last after surmounting all sorts of super- 
natural obstacles are uniformly stated to have 
done), or whether all the dramatis personam 



187 



came to untimely ends, like the characters 
in Dumas' Chevalier cle Maison Rouge, I am 
unable to state, having retired before the final 
denoument of the story. Jacob elucidated so 
much of the plot as has been given above in 
the following manner. " Dat shentlemans, 
Sare, e go to zeparate vrom ees waife cause 
zhe zbencl too mosh monee. Dat toder old 
vellow e zays to im e go to de playbank to 
ketch im some back, but den he lose all ees 
monee." 

There is a capital hotel at Nieuwe Diep, just 
inside the great sea dam, with as engaging a 
landlady as the hostess of the Blue Dragon in 
Martin Chuzzlewit. And her daughter gave 
me such sunny smiles — the only language 
which she could speak and I understand — that 
they quite warmed me up. Alas ! before my next 
visit to Holland she is likely to have become 



188 



the " G-evrouw," that is to say, " Mrs." some- 
body or other, and consequently lost all that 
soft and fascinating interest which, in the eye 
of bachelorhood, attaches to a " Miss." The 
only drawback to one's perfect comfort at the 
Hotel den Burg was the circumstance that the 
top and bottom of my bed were both so high, 
and the middle so low, that I slept in an atti- 
tude which might be represented by the 
letter V. Apropos to this subject it may be 
mentioned that Dutch beds and bedrooms are 
universally comfortable, and of course, like 
everything else in Holland, not merely posi- 
tively, but superlatively, clean. They present 
in these respects a very satisfactory contrast 
to some of the beds which the traveller in 
France meets with, which seem to be nothing 
but lace and fleas, and they are distinguished 
in a still more gratifying manner from those 



189 



in Spain which are nothing but dirt and fleas 
without even the lace. The unlucky " tourist " 
who is rash and reckless enough to commit 
his person to a Spanish bed, tosses, and if he 
be a person of lax principle, expletivizes, and 
and is brought to such a fiery state of cuta- 
neous irritation that it does not subside for 
a month. Nor are Dutch windows contrived 
on the plan which obtains elsewhere through- 
out the continent; I mean that ingenious 
principle of construction which effectually 
defeats all endeavours made either to open or 
shut them, so that you are either stifled with 
heat, or else sleep in a gale of wind sufficient 
to sail a fleet. But it would be unfair to 
abuse continental hotels, without admitting 
that some of our English ones run them 
very hard indeed in point of Hastiness and 
discomfort. Take, for example, the Quebec 



190 



at Portsmouth, which happens to correspond 
with the Burg at Nieuwe Diep in the circum- 
stance of standing at the mouth of the harbour 
of the principal naval arsenal of the country. 
It was the fate of my family and myself to 
spend a night and a day there last year. We 
had considered that the singular advantage 
of the situation of the house would compensate 
for almost any amount of discomfort which we 
might have to encounter. But next to that 
Augean stable the Prinz Karl at Heidelberg, 
the Quebec is probably the most flagitiously 
dirty inn in the whole world. Not only was it 
nefariously fleazy, but our couches were shared 
by even still more objectionable bedfellows, red 
as cherries, and positively almost as large, so 
much so that I felt it my duty to point out to 
the landlord, in case the idea might not have 
occurred to him, that he had the means con- 



191 



veniently available of becoming a successful 
competitor at the Smithfield Cattle Show. It 
was impossible, consistently with perfect can- 
dour, to compliment him on the quality of 
Avhat he might with strict propriety hav 
termed his "prime nautical port/' since it 
appeared to be an unpleasant combination of 
tar and bilgewater obtained from the adjoining 
dockyard. It may be mentioned also, by way 
of an example of the commissariat arrange- 
ments of the establishment, that we found it 
necessary to make a hurried communication to 
the waiter who brought our breakfast that 
we considered that our interview with the 
butter, short as it had been, could not be pro- 
tracted with advantage. Bless me. if that 
isn't another digression ! Well, it can't be 
helped. My pen has the same sort of per- 
versity which a certain footman, who had a 



192 



weakness for breaking china, laid to the charge 
of the dessert service, when upon letting the 
tray fall he exclaimed in the tone of an in- 
jured victim, " That's the seventh time it has 
served me so!" My pen is always serving me 
so. 

On returning from the Helcler to Amsterdam 
the route may be pleasantly varied by taking a 
steamer from Alkmaar which passes through 
Zaandam, the place where Peter the Great is 
said to have learnt shipbuilding. It is more 
correct to write " said to have learnt " because 
though that was his ostensible occupation, there 
is good reason to believe that his stay in Hol- 
land was employed in acquiring knowledge 
of a much more important and profitable kind. 
It would be as vain to go to Zaanclam nowadays 
to learn shipbuilding as it would be to take up 
one's abode at Charing Cross to study agri- 



193 



culture. For the old dockyards are deserted, 
and the few small craft which are launched 
upon the waters of the Zaan are built in 
strict accordance with the conservative prin- 
ciples of design by which Dutch naval 
architecture is regulated. They are in fact 
jolly old tubs of the ancient style, and form 
a very striking contrast to the clippers of the 
present day. I have no notion what constitutes 
the action or practice of u clipping " on the 
part of a ship, but it is quite certain that if 
the proceeding partakes in any degree of the 
lively or dashing, it is the very last thing in 
the world which these heavy-gaited * Zaandam 
barges would think of doing. In the account 
given by Washington Irving of the voyage 
from Holland to America of the first founders 

* There never was a neater little bit of graphic word-painting 
than Shakespeare's ' ' heavy-gaited toads." 





194 



of New York there is a description of a Dutch 
ship which is so quaint and amusing that I 
am tempted to import it bodily into my text. 
It is as follows. " The ship in which these 
illustrious adventurers set sail was called the 
G-oede Vrouw, or Good Woman, in compli- 
ment to the wife of the president of the West 
India Company, who was allowed by everybody 
(except her husband) to be a sweet tempered 
lady, when not in liquor. It was in truth a 
most gallant vessel, of the most approved 
Dutch construction, and made by the ablest 
ship-carpenters of Amsterdam, who, it is well 
known, always model their ships after the 
fair forms of their countrywomen. Accordingly, 
it had one hundred feet in the beam, one 
hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet 
from the bottom of the sternpost to the taflerel. 
Like the beauteous model, who was declared 



195 



to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, it was 
full in the bows, with a pair of enormous cat- 
heads, a copper bottom, and withal, a most 
prodigious poop. The architect, who was some- 
what of a religious man, far from decorating 
the ship with pagan idols, such as Jupiter, 
Neptune, or Hercules (which heathenish abomi- 
nations, I have no doubt, occasion the mis- 
fortunes and shipwreck of many a noble vessel), 
he, I say, on the contrary, did laudably erect 
for a head a goodly image of St. Nicholas, 
equipped with a low broad-brimmed hat, a 
huge pair of Flemish trunk hose, and a pipe 
that reached to the end of the bowsprit. Thus 
gallantly furnished, the staunch ship floated 
sideways, like a majestic goose, out of the 
harbour of the great city of Amsterdam; and all 
the bells that were not otherwise engaged rung 
a triple bob-major on the joyful occasion. My 

o 2 



196 



great-great-grandfather remarks that the voyage 
was uncommonly prosperous ; for being under 
the care of the ever-revered St. Nicholas, the 
G-oede Vrouw seemed to be endowed with 
qualities unknown to common vessels. Thus, 
she made as much lee-way as head-way, could 
get along very nearly as fast with the wind 
ahead as when it was apoop, and was particu- 
larly great in a calm ; in consequence of which 
singular advantages she made out to accomplish 
her voyage in a very few months, and came to 
anchor at the mouth of the Hudson, a little 
to the east of Gibbet island." 

Zaandam is the head quarters of windmills. 
The air seems quite alive with their innu- 
merable sails. Their number, however, is 
diminishing, and it is probable that steam will 
soon "take the wind out of their sails" in more 
senses than one. These windmills are maids 



197 



of all work, since they make themselves useful 
in all sorts of capacities. They grind stones to 
powder for making cement, and for puff- 
balling Dutch floors and babies. In these 
adulterating days, too, this same powder enters, 
no doubt, together with other ingredients 
known only to the compounders, into the 
brown sugar and arrowroot supplied to the 
British public by our profligate grocers. The 
consumer also of "Dubarry's delicious health- 
restoring revalenta Arabica food" is at liberty 
to entertain himself with the curious reflection 
that he may very probably, at any given 
repast, be refreshing himself with a fragment 
of pulverized Dutch milestone, by way of a 
light and nutritious form of sustenance ! The oil 
which supplies your moderateur lamp was most 
likely squeezed from the seed at Zaandam, and 
the linseed cakes for fattening cattle which form 



198 



almost the staple commodity of trade at such 
towns as Aylesbury and Keigate which are 
situated in the midst of agricultural districts, 
come mostly from the banks of the Zaan, 
Anyone who has a taste for applied mechanics 
will derive great pleasure from observing how 
ingeniously the working of these various pro- 
cesses is contrived. Large quantities of 
tobacco, also, are ground into snuff at these 
mills. The loss of battles by the first Napo- 
leon must have communicated a feverish im- 
petus to the snuff trade, since he is said to 
have taken it wholesale when he got into a 
stew. During the anxious struggle at Waterloo 
he seems to have shovelled up in the palm 
of his hand something like a spadeful. As 
long as my late servant Mr. Jacob continues 
to stuff his nose as actively as at present there 
is no danger of the trade becoming languid. 



199 



He used to take what is called "black rappee." 
This snuff is made from the leaves of tobacco 
with an admixture of what are known to the 
initiated as "smalls/' that is to say broken 
fibres of the plant which are too small to be 
conveniently smoked in a pipe. The dark 
colour is communicated to the mixture by 
wetting it, whereby it undergoes a slight 
degree of fermentation. In the result, black 
Rappee always appears to me uncomfortably 
like chopped hay soaked in ink. 

My quarters on returning to Amsterdam 
were at the Hotel des Pays Bas in the Doelen 
Straat. It is to be recommended. The ma- 
nagement of the house is principally confided 
to the head waiter, whose father was a rich 
merchant of Rotterdam, but who failed, or, 
as Jacob expressed it, "went behind." The 
son, for lack of something better to do, became 



200 



a waiter, which has not prevented him from 
continuing to be a very nice young fellow. A 
similar thing occurred within my own know- 
ledge in the case of a man who descended from 
being the owner of a considerable property in 
Scotland to becoming waiter at a second-rate 
inn in Jersey. The case of Murat, who ascended 
from the manipulation of a napkin to wielding 
a sceptre, is unique, but there are probably 
more people than the world at large knows 
anything about who achieve something like the 
converse of that proceeding. 

There are two secrets worth knowing about 
Amsterdam. The first of them is where to get 
the real Friesland gingerbread which is im- 
ported from Deventer, the chief place of its 
manufacture, by the coasting steamers of the 
Zuider Zee. Dutch people cut it into shavings 
as thin as Vauxhall slices of ham, and then eat 



201 



it veneered upon bread and butter. The other 
secret is where the best beer in Amsterdam is 
to be obtained. Not being addicted either to 
beer or gingerbread myself, I do not forbear to 
impart information on these points to the general 
public from any desire to monopolise the supply 
of either article. I withhold it simply with a 
view to the chance of receiving some trifling 
gratuity, pecuniary or otherwise, from any of 
my acquaintances who may contemplate visiting 
Amsterdam, and who may wish to be put in 
possession of the necessary intelligence on 
matters of so much importance. Some trifling 
remuneration for these disclosures will be 
considered but just and reasonable when the 
inestimable value of the revelations in question 
is reflected on. 

The beams with pulleys attached to them 
which project from almost every house in 



202 



Amsterdam are a distinguishing mark of the 
trading pursuits of the community, and form a 
peculiar feature in the general aspect of the 
city. On calling on a friend, one of the chief 
magnates of Holland, living in the Keizers 
Gracht, the Belgrave Square of Amsterdam, 
I observed that his house had not only its 
beam and pulley^ but a door in the front of an 
upper story such as you see in lofts and ware- 
houses in England, for admitting goods. My 
friend's daughter, the acknowledged belle 
of Amsterdam, exhibited in herself a com- 
pendium of the particular class of personal 
attractions which distinguish pretty young 
ladies of the highest grade in Holland. An 
ordinary specimen of this type will be found 
as plump as a pippin, as rosy as a fine sunrise, 
and with a complexion so brilliant that it forms 



203 



quite a feminine firework. Composed and com- 
fortable in manner, and so thoroughly good- 
natured as to lead one to suppose that she 
must have lived on Deventer gingerbread, and 
that the honey which forms so large an ingre- 
dient in the composition of that delicacy must 
have thoroughly imbued her nature. Dutch 
young ladies are alleged to carry, like the old 
heavy coaches, a good deal of luggage in the 
hind boot, I respectfully abstain from presum- 
ing even to form any conjecture on a subject of 
such infinite delicacy. Dutch young gentle- 
men, so far as I have had the means of 
judging, appear to be everything that is nice 
and well-bred. How different from German 
students reeking with stale tobacco, bloated 
and sodden with beer with which they drench 
themselves to an excess which is odious to hear 



204 



of and detestable to see— publichouse sots, in 
short, of the lowest description — and as dirty 
in their persons as Whitechapel Jews ! 

A Cambridge man who wakes up on his 
first morning at Amsterdam and cannot at 
the first moment recollect where he is, will 
probably imagine himself to be again at the 
University. For the smell of dried sedge, 
which is also used for lighting fires in the fen 
districts of England, is always perceptible at 
Amsterdam. It may be remarked that any 
tolerably acute nose may discover its own 
whereabouts for the time being by means of 
its own perceptions unaided by those of any 
other sense. The dullest of olfactories must 
of course perceive the difference of the impres- 
sions which it experiences in different localities 
according to the nature of the products of the 
soil. Sussex is redolent of burning oak logs ; 



205 



the high grounds of Hampshire are " strong " 
of sheep, while the air in the valleys below 
is tainted by a certain disagreeable odour of 
coarse grass, difficult to describe, but suffi- 
ciently familiar to every nose whose proprietor 
may happen to have been educated at "Win- 
chester College. The coal districts are dis- 
tinguished by the unsavoury fumes of the 
bonfires which are lighted by spontaneous 
combustion at the pits' mouths, and which go 
on smouldering there for ever. The smell of 
this particular smoke is slightly different from 
that which escapes from the tall chimneys of 
the manufacturing districts, and is quite 
another thing from the emanations from the 
grates of private houses with which we are so 
unpleasantly familiar in London. Few noses 
which have penetrated into the rich pastoral 
districts of the Vale of Aylesbury can have 



206 



failed to remark the odour of cows and cattle 
which there prevails. And lastly, though 
examples of this kind might be multiplied to 
any extent, there is in low countries the smell 
of burnt sedge which has been before referred 
to, and which brings me back to Amsterdam. 

Eistori was playing at Amsterdam at 
this time. The town was placarded with 
gigantic posters of the " Gevrouw Eistori," 
which looked not a little funny. Jacob begged 
very hard to be allowed to accompany me 
southwards, notwithstanding an offer which he 
had received from a Russian grandee who was 
staying at the same hotel as myself to take him 
for a several days' tour through North Holland. 
Jacob said " I should rather go wiz you, Sare. 
Though I do not tinksh dat you willsh gib me 
more monee dan she would" ("She" being 
the Russian gentleman). " For I like you, 



207 



Sare. You seem to be please wiz all dat you 
see, and I tinksli dat you like me, Sare." Such 
being the state of Jacob's feelings towards me, 
it was obviously impossible to dismiss him. 
So we started for Scheveningen together. 

As we passed through the Hague, Jacob did 
not fail to point out the spot where the De 
Witts were torn in pieces by the mob. His 
narrative of the transaction was historically 
accurate, although not clothed in the precise 
language in which Gibbon or Macaulay would 
have related the details of the occurrence. 
"She" {i.e. the mob) pullsh dem open, and 
tooksh out all de tings dat dey had inside." 
The vegetable market at the Hague is worth a 
visit. The magnificent size of the cauliflowers 
attracted my notice. Three of them might be 
bought for fivepence. 

The prettiest drive in the world, through a 



208 



tunnell of green trees which interlace their 
branches over the road, takes you in twenty 
minutes or so from the Hague to Scheveningen. 
This is the watering place of Holland, whither 
the aristocracy of the Netherlands goes to 
pickle itself at the bathing season. One 
might remark with great truth of the Dutch 
ladies who splash about in the waves there 
what Virgil says of certain seabirds — 

"Certatim largos humeris infundere rores 
Et studio incassum videas gestire lavandi." 

That is, if the ordinary interpretation of 
incassum, namely, "fruitlessly", inasmuch as 
since they are at the tiptop acme of cleanliness 
already they cannot make themselves any 
cleaner by washing, be the correct one. There 
is a fine open sea, and a smooth sandy beach, 
at Scheveningen. The bathing establishments 
are dotted along the shore, the town lying 



209 



snugly nestled in a hollow inland. There is a 
capital boarding house, combining in itself the 
advantages of a club. Strangers are admitted 
if they can make interest (which Jacob did for 
me) with the manager. The only single circum- 
stance connected with this handsome and most 
comfortable institution which was otherwise 
than agreeable was that it reminded me a little 
of the somewhat similar establishments at Har- 
rogate. My recollections of Harrogate are not 
pleasant. The recommendations of the place, 
if it has any, wholly eluded my detection. 
People who have overeaten themselves during 
the season in London, and are labouring under 
ailments consequent thereupon, and who, 
concurrently with these afflictions, suffer from 
an absolute vacuity of intellect, betake them- 
selves in the summer to Harrogate. There 
they drink nasty waters, listen to fearful bands, 

p 



210 



parade up and down pleasure grounds hardly 
equal to second-rate tea gardens in the suburbs 
of London, or are drawn about by paralytic 
and desponding fly horses on that dustiest of 
commons. Society there lives in public, and 
talks nothing for weeks together but inane 
commonplaces, with which it is perfectly 
satisfied. At the hotel there (the best), at 
which I once contrived to cling on to life 
through a dreary term of penance, the managers 
of the place, for some reason known only to 
themselves, allowed us no extinguishers. On 
hammering down, therefore, as it thus became 
inevitably necessary to do, the head of the 
candle every night with the heel of a boot on 
getting into bed, I breathed such fervent 
anathemas against the whole locality, and 
everybody and everything in it, that if these 
maledictory aspirations had been fulfilled, the 



211 



whole place would have gone to the extremely 
bad forthwith. But to return from Harrogate 
to Scheveningen. 

Though the latter place is so breezy and 
open, yet it cannot be said that "nihil est 
nisi pontus et aer," for an evil odour sometimes 
prevails there, so overwhelming and intense that 
one almost wonders it is not palpable to the eye 
or touch. When this terrible visitation occurs, 
people who are engaged in the tranquil enjoy- 
ment of beefsteaks or water zouche under the 
verandah in front of the club house, make a 
retreat indoors in abject discomfiture, and in as 
precipitate a manner as the guests at a table 
d'hote on board a steamer are apt to do when 
the vessel makes a sudden and lively lunge. 
As for me, at the very first whiff I sent for a 
fly, and hurried inland. The source of the mis- 
chief is in the main drain of the place which 

p 2 



212 



flows uncovered over the beach into the sea. 
As long as the wind sets in the same direction 
as the current of this stream, no inconvenience 
arises, but at other times you have absolutely 
no alternative but flight. Jacob's account of 
the matter was as follows. " You see, Sare, de 
closet of de town he runsh out into de zee here, 
and when de eastwest wind blow, he smellsh 
very nashty." 

On returning to the Hague, we shipped our- 
selves on board a trekskuit for transport to 
Delft. In the large church at Delft is the 
family vault, or, as Jacob termed it, the 
" cellar," of the royal family of Holland. 
Outside the town is a large cemetery. After a 
Dutchman has been put to bed with a spade, 
the place of his rest is marked by a flat stone. 
When this stone is left quite blank, as is often 
the case, its appearance rather suggests the 



213 



notion of the slab having been placed there, like 
a letter-weight, to prevent the party below from 
popping up again, to the prejudice of the testa- 
mentary dispositions which his legatees feel it s( 
desirable to sustain. Dutch cemeteries are cer- 
tainly not interesting, but they are at any rate 
less absolutely offensive to the eye than most of~ 
our English places of interment. Some few 
o-ravevards in this country might be named, as. 
for example, that at Peterborough Cathedral, and, 
in a lesser degree, Highgate cemetery, which 
are agreeable scenes to contemplate. But many 
of such places are unseemly with disorder and 
neglect, and disgraceful to the community 
which ought to have them kept in decent order. 
And could a diseased imagination possibly 
conceive anything more hideous than some of 
the monumental structures which are to be 
seen in English cemeteries? Epitaphs consist- 



214 



ing merely of fulsome praise of the deceased are 
so universal that the little girl who asked where 
the bad people are buried had good reason for 
her question. It would confer a great benefit 
on society if somebody of any taste or educa- 
tion would supply country undertakers with a 
few unobjectionable epitaphs. In particular, it 
would be of advantage to Hampshire to intro- 
duce into the churchyards there some variation 
from the perpetually recurring four lines the 
second of which ends with " Canaan's happy 
shore/' and the fourth, of course, with " ever- 
more." It is a bad form of elegy, assuming, 
as it does, the precise point with reference 
to the present state of the deceased which 
necessarily still remains to be proved. Our 
stock four lines in Sussex which end with " the 
great judgment day," to rhyme with " all 
covered with cold clay " in the second verse, 



215 



are well enough, down in the Weald where 
the geological structure of the graveyard 
renders the statement about the clay unim- 
peachably accurate as a matter of fact. "When, 
however, this particular formation gives place 
to a warm and dry sand, as is the case at 
Lindfleld, which lies just off the edge of the 
Weald, the altered conditions of interment 
are frequently overlooked by the elegist. 

Jacob's observations on things in general 
continuing to be embodied in English diction 
which, like the smell from the Thames, had a 
peculiar raciness of its own about it, he suc- 
ceeded in persuading me to allow him to 
accompany me through Rotterdam to Dort, 
Breda, and Bergen op Zoom, and thence on 
to Antwerp. Breda and Bergen op Zoom are 
both first-class fortresses. In Holland you 
are allowed to wander about on the works of 



216 



fortified places just as you please, and it is 
very interesting and amusing to examine the 
defences in this way. In France it is quite 
otherwise, for walking on the banks is every- 
where strictly prohibited, and if there happens 
to be any spot, as, for example, on the high 
ground which environs Toulon harbour, whence 
a good view of the fortifications may be ob- 
tained, you will probably, if you stop there 
to enjoy the prospect, receive a peremptory 
notice from some sentinel of " on ne s'arrete 
pas ici." You have then to choose between 
what a policeman would call u muving on," or 
else submitting to the inconvenient alternative 
of the insertion on the part of the soldier of a 
few inches of cool bayonet into your person 
by way of imparting additional force to his 
suggestion. In speaking of Breda, honour- 
able mention should be made of the hotel 



217 



there, which is a quaint old place, but as com- 
fortable and nice in every respect as can 
possibly be. The landlord asked for my pass- 
port for the purpose of copying from it his 
guest's name to put on the bill. He got as 
far as W in William, but then shrank from 
encountering the perils of English ortho- 
graphy, and headed his little account with 
certain Dutch words meaning "For the Esquire 
Mister," by way of intimating his full recog- 
nition of my gentility. 

On setting sail from Antwerp for London it 
became at last inevitably necessary to part with 
the faithful Jacob. He stood with his hat in 
his hand and made me a formal speech which 
was not altogether untinctured with emotion. 
It was much the same in effect as that of which 
he had previously delivered himself at Amster- 
dam, and which has been already quoted. 



218 



However, it was very much to the point, and 
sufficiently proved that a few days' further 
acquaintance and companionship had not im- 
paired his geniality of feeling towards me, It 
was as follows " Good bye, Sare. I am please 
wid you, Sare. You hab gib me satisfaction. 
For you hab seem to like me, and you was 
please wid everything vat you hab see. God 
bless you, Sare. Mr. Ahly, I am please wid 
you." The last words were spoken with a 
sententious emphasis which was highly im- 
pressive. And so, with many promises to 
come and see me in England, and in a lively 
paroxysm of bowing, Mr. Jacob disappeared. 
It was not quite so comic a proceeding as that 
of the Italian who ; having acquired a smat- 
tering of English from a dialogue book, fell 
into an unfortunate conglomeration of ideas 
among the various terms of address proper 



219 



to be used on meeting and taking leave respec- 
tively. So on parting with an English gentle- 
man to whom he was much attached, he 
sobbed forth convulsively " Good-bye, Sir; 
God bless you. Sir ; Good bye, Sir ; How d'ye 
do, how dye do, how d'ye do ! " 

Having thus come to an end of the list of 
stray bits of observation collected dining two 
visits to Holland, it only remains to recom- 
mend any of my friends who have not yet 
seen that country to take the earliest possible 
opportunity of going there. There is no district 
in the world of equal extent in which there 
is so very much to interest and amuse in the 
mere external aspect of things in general. 
The Dutch, too, are a thoroughly pleasant 
people to be amongst, and there are points 
in their national character which are worthy 
of the highest admiration. A Sussex former 



220 



after discussing with me on some occasion 
the state of affairs on the Continent, stated 
his opinion of the superiority of England to 
all other countries by saying " Well, Sir, I 
ha'nt no opinion o' foreign nations, myself." 
It was a delightfully complacent expression 
of his feeling of self-satisfaction as an English- 
man, and might well have come from a " ge- 
nu-ine " Yankee declaring his contempt for all 
creation out of the States. Were, however, 
my agricultural friend to go a few hundred 
miles due east from Sussex, he would learn to 
his infinite surprise that all the grandeur 
which can ennoble humanity is not exclusively 
confined to the inhabitants of the Weald. 
And he would be compelled, however reluc- 
tantly, to admit that Englishmen generally 
might learn some useful lessons from the 
Dutch. Not to speak of certain moral qualities 



which the Dutch possess in a higher degree 
than ourselves, there is one virtue in which no 
nation approaches theru, and that is cleanli- 
ness. The common proverb that cleanliness 
is next to godliness seems in one sense to do 
hut scanty justice to the former quality. For 
to be clean is an indispensable preliminary to 
becoming godly. Without being clean, when 
it is possible to be so, any true self-respect, 
which forms a necessary element in morality, 
is a mere pretence. What can any reasonable 
person hope from the inhabitants of such places 
as Middlesex Lane and Bedfordbury, till those 
Augean stables of filth have been thoroughly 
cleaned out? Dirt, too, is a greater breach 
of duty to one's species than a slight amount 
of immorality. For, generally speaking, the 
laxity of a man's principles signifies little but 
to himself and those with whom he is closely 



222 



connected, while dirt, obvious or suspected, 
inflicts a grievance on every right-minded in- 
dividual with whom the offender comes in 
contact. Unavoidable and temporary infringe- 
ments of the great law of cleanliness may of 
course be excused. Clean hands in London 
are next to impossible. And the evil in this 
c&se is strictly local. In London, too, there 
seems to be some perverse and unhappy ma- 
lignity in the nature of " blacks" which 
prompts them to congregate from all quar- 
ters on gentlemen's shirt-fronts. This is 
more observably the case if the person in 
question is proceeding to make a call at some 
house or other where he has special reasons 
of his own for desiring to appear particularly 
brilliant. - But such exceptional infringements 
of the grand law of cleanliness are venial as 
compared with the utter disregard of the duty 



223 



of ablution which is evinced by the" gene- 
ral condition of body of a German count. 
The breast of a Prussian grandee is like " the 
spacious firmament on high/' as Dr. Watts' 
says, in respect of the number of stars which 
it displays, but his linen, if he has any, is 
either judiciously concealed from view, or, if 
it is descried by too curious an investigation, 
is observed to be of the colour of a dead laurel 
leaf. It is to be hoped that English people 
will some day or other learn from the Dutch 
that to wash oneself thoroughly all over at least 
once in each twenty-four hours is everybody's 
paramount duty to society. 

It may be mentioned that no intending visi- 
tor to Holland need take any trouble whatever 
about a passport. It is demanded on landing 
as a matter of form, but merely as a matter of 
form, and any pretence of an excuse for being 



224 



without one will readily be accepted. Indeed, 
the soldier who asks for it on the quay as you 
step on shore, being in all probability su- 
blimely ignorant of English, will be willing to 
receive any general observation which it may 
occur to you to make, addressed to him in the 
tone and manner of an excuse, as such. So 
that when he gruffly inquires for your " pas- 
poort" it will be quite sufficient to observe that 
it's a fine morning, or that he is looking char- 
mingly well, or that you don't feel quite the 
thing after the sea. Or you can express with 
an air of kind solicitude (as I did on my last 
occasion of landing in Holland) the hope that 
his cold is better. You will find that he will 
bow to you with true Dutch politeness, and 
intimate that the account which you have 
given of yourself is perfectly regular and satis- 
factory. 



225 



The Dutch language is easily picked up. 
As has been before observed in these pages, a 
large proportion of the words are either spelt, 
or else pronounced, just like the English terms 
which they translate. To take an instance (the 
first which happens to occur to me, although 
similar examples might be indefinitely multi- 
plied), you will observe that Buiksloot, at the 
South end of the great ship canal, is pro- 
nounced " Bowkslote." You thus find that ui 
in Dutch is sounded, at any rate sometimes, 
like ou in English, and hence you may con- 
jecture that our word " out" is likely enough 
to be "nit" in Dutch. Which is just what it 
is, as may be verified at the first railway station 
you come to, where you will see people making 
their exit by a door with the superscription 
"uitgang." A great deal of Dutch may be 
picked up by this very simple plan. Except in 

Q 



226 



proper names, there is no y in pure Dutch. 
This circumstance is presented to one's notice in 
rather a quaint shape at the Buiksloot lock 
of the grand canal, where a polyglot inscription 
on a board informs navigators of all countries 
generally, and English captains in particular, 
that "It is strictly forbidden to the officers of 
the canal to accept chink raonij." The best 
Dutch grammar is perhaps one by a gentleman 
rejoicing (so far as the circumstance can be 
considered in his particular case as a legitimate 
subject of exultation) in the name of Pyl. It 
maybe bought for seven and sixpence atNutt's 
in the Strand, and will probably be procurable 
second hand in Holland for very much less. 
I picked up a copy at an old book stall in the 
suburbs of Bergen op Zoom for a sum equiva- 
lent to sevenpence-halfpenny of English money. 
The author of the book has commendably 



227 



departed from the principle on which most 
grammars are written, which seems to be that 
of driving the learner to distraction without 
imparting the smallest glimmering whatever of 
the language which he desires to acquire. 

I have said that the Dutch are a thoroughly 
pleasant people to visit They are always 
dignified, yet perfectly goodnatured, friendly, 
and obliging. But they have too much self- 
respect and independence of character to con- 
descend to be either servile or obsequious. 
Perhaps it is hardly too much to say that 
nobody who knows how to behave need ever 
encounter an unkind look, or an uncivil word, 
in travelling in any civilized country. There is 
a certain conduct and bearing which renders 
this more universally and invariably true than 
vulgar and wrong-headed people have any 
notion of. But the traveller who gets a rough 



228 



word in Holland must be a very rampant and 
outrageous snob indeed. A Dutchman, how- 
ever, has as sturdy a spirit as an Anglo-Saxon, 
and is no respecter of persons if he receives a 
blow, or is subjected to any other indignity. 
An Austrian general learnt this to his cost 
last year. He arrived, attended by two aides- 
de-camp and two secretaries, at the railway 
station at Amsterdam, and finding no convey- 
ance there, enquired of the porters how long- 
it would take to walk to the Pays Bas Hotel. 
They replied a quarter of an hour. The party 
therefore consigned their luggage (which con- 
tained, no doubt, seeing that they were 
Austrians, a modicum of clean linen bearing 
a very unsatisfactory proportion to the mass 
of orders and decorations which accompanied 
it) to the porters, and followed them on foot 
to the hotel. But the general was gouty and 



229 



plethoric, which caused him to be, as we say 
in Sussex, " a shocking bad footman," and 
his trousers were strapped down with such 
agonizing tightness that progression was 
rendered a matter of arduous difficulty. Arriv- 
ing, therefore, at the hotel very hot in his 
body and peppery in his temper, and the 
burning pavement having doubtless established 
lively inflammatory action in his corns, he 
testily observed that the walk had occupied at 
least half an hour, and kicked one of the 
porters for what he considered to have been 
his base misrepresentation of the distance. 
Now in a country so prostrated by military 
oppression as Austria, a man of humble 
station would have had to digest this insult as 
best he might by grinding his teeth in silence. 
But not so in Holland. The two porters imme- 
diately pulled off their coats by way of intimat- 



230 



ing that they meant business, and gave the Aus- 
trian, and his two aides-de-camp, and his two 
secretaries, such a "warming" with their fists 
as they were very unlikely to forget. Black 
eyes and bruised noses would seem, from 
Jacob's account, to have prevailed throughout 
the party afterwards. Jacob related the story 
to me with a gush of patriotic pride and 
fervour, concluding his narrative thus — " She " 
(that is to say the four Austrians) " get a blue 
eye and blue nose, and " (magnificent anticli- 
max to the tale ! ) " ze porters was all over 
wiz pusperation." 

Before concluding, it will be as well to say 
something about the ways and means of 
getting to Holland. There are steamers from 
London to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Har- 
lingen, and if you wish to see the places 
between the Schelde and the Meuse, you can 



231 



return by Antwerp, which is but an hour or 
two by railway from the Dutch frontier. 
These boats are all of them more or less ex- 
cellent, and it may be mentioned that their 
commissariat arrangements are conducted on 
so liberal a scale as fully to meet the re- 
quirements which are engendered by the 
miraculously appetizing effect which sea air 
is apt to exercise on certain organizations. 
The number and extent of the meals which 
people on board a steamer indulge in when 
the sea is calm, is something portentous, 
amounting, indeed, to a social phenomenon of 
a very surprising character. My attention 
was on one occasion attracted to the case 
of a lady who in the space of a few hours 
made three separate onslaughts on cold round 
of beef. The slices, or more properly speak- 
ing, circular disks of meat, which were sup- 



232 



plied to her were almost big enough to be 
suggestive of the tops of small loo tables. Yet 
at the time when I ceased to note her pro- 
ceedings, she had evinced no signs of be- 
coming what chemists call " an exhausted 
receiver." 

There is a very good Dutch steamer called 
the Batavier, which plies between London 
and Rotterdam. It is a new boat, and a 
vast improvement on its predecessor of the 
same name. " The old Batty/' as she was 
lovingly termed by Thames watermen, almost 
rivalled the everlasting hills in permanence 
and immobility. Irreverent passengers with 
no respect for age or sex were apt to stig- 
matize her as a pernicious old tub. She 
was said to be the queerest thing that ever 
came up the river. A sailor told me that 
she was considered "a very lucky boat." For 



233 



she was once out four or five days after her 
time, flopping about under sail in the North 
Sea, having used up all her coals. " She 
burnt up everything she could lay her hands 
on." But to everybody's utter astonishment 
she came in at last ! Her engines were 
afflicted with some bronchial affection which 
caused them to gasp and guggle in a way 
which was pitiable to listen to. She has 
lately been transferred to a sphere of use- 
fulness better adapted to her peculiar capa- 
bilities, by being converted into a coal hulk, 
and is now moored off Rotterdam. 

My mother has told me that some years 
ago on communicating to an ancient house- 
keeper her intention of making a voyage to 
France, the old lady exclaimed " What ! 
Miss Mary, are you going to cross the sea? 
Well, I'm sure if it was me, I'd go to 



234 



France by land, though it was ever so fur 
round." I relate this comical little anec- 
dote as introductory to the remark that if 
you don't mind going "ever so fur round," 
you may, by sneaking ignominiously across the 
ferry from Dover to Calais, and making a great 
circumbendibus up through Belgium, get from 
London to Holland pretty nearly overland. 

I will not protract these notes of mine to a 
more intolerable length, being painfully con- 
scious how woefully dull is the song I have 
been singing; but should you, most amiable 
reader, wish to know something more about the 
canals, and the bridges, and the polders, and 
the ships, and the towns, and the organs, and 
the tulips, are not these things written in the 
book of Murray? Should you be fond of 
Dutch paintings, yet object to crossing the sea 
to pay your homage to "the great Paul 



235 



Potter," ) T ou should go to see the very beautiful 
Cuyp in Mr. Holford's collection in Park Lane. 
It is a view of Dort, and, in its way, quite 
unsurpassed even by the wonders at Amster- 
dam and the Hague. Should you suppose that 
there can be no beauty in entirely flat scenes, 
pray read the beginning of one of the chapters 
in " Alton Locke." The author of that novel, in 
an account of a railway journey up the eastern 
side of England, gives a capital moving pano- 
rama of the fen country, vividly delineating the 
picturesque beauties of flat scenes which care- 
less eyes do not discover them to possess. In 
Goldsmith's Traveller, is the following little 
sketch of Dutch scenery, quite a gem of poeti- 
cal landscape painting, but which, strange to 
say, is not even alluded to in Murray. 

" To men of other minds my fancy flies, 
Embosomed in the deep where Holland lies, 



236 



Methinks her patient sons before me stand, 
Where the broad ocean leans against the land, 
And, sedulous to stop the coming tide, 
Lift the tall rampart's artificial pride. 
Onward, methinks, and diligently slow, 
The firm connected bulwark seems to grow, 
Spreads its long arms amid the watery roar, 
Scoops out an empire, and usurps the shore ; 
While the pent ocean rising o'er the pile 
Sees an amphibious world beneath him smile, 
The slow canal, the yellow blossomed vale, 
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail, 
The crowded mart, the cultivated plain, 
A new creation rescued from his reign." 



THE END. 



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